Experimental Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Steering and Randomness Generation Beyond Qubits

In a measurement-device-independent or quantum-refereed protocol, a referee can verify whether two parties share entanglement or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering without the need to trust either of the parties or their devices. The need for trusting a party is substituted by a quantum channel between the referee and that party, through which the referee encodes the measurements to be performed on that party's subsystem in a set of nonorthogonal quantum states. In this Letter, an EPR-steering inequality is adapted as a quantum-refereed EPR-steering witness, and the trust-free experimental verification of higher dimensional quantum steering is reported via preparing a class of entangled photonic qutrits. Further, with two measurement settings, we extract $1.106\pm0.023$ bits of private randomness per every photon pair from our observed data, which surpasses the one-bit limit for projective measurements performed on qubit systems. Our results advance research on quantum information processing tasks beyond qubits.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Experimental validation of quantum steering ellipsoids and tests of volume monogamy relations

The set of all qubit states that can be steered to by measurements on a correlated qubit is predicted to form an ellipsoid---called the quantum steering ellipsoid---in the Bloch ball. This ellipsoid provides a simple visual characterisation of the initial 2-qubit state, and various aspects of entanglement are reflected in its geometric properties. We experimentally verify these properties via measurements on many different polarisation-entangled photonic qubit states. Moreover, for pure 3-qubit states, the volumes of the two quantum steering ellipsoids generated by measurements on the first qubit are predicted to satisfy a tight monogamy relation, which is strictly stronger than the well-known monogamy of entanglement for concurrence. We experimentally verify these predictions, using polarisation and path entanglement. We also show experimentally that this monogamy relation can be violated by a mixed entangled state, which nevertheless satisfies a weaker monogamy relation

Exclusive Semileptonic Rare Decays B→K(∗)l+l−B \to K^{(*)} l^+ l^- in a SUSY SO(10) GUT

In the SUSY SO(10) GUT context, we study the exclusive processes $B \to K^{(*)} l^+l^-(l=\mu,\tau)$. Using the Wilson coefficients of relevant operators including the new operators $Q_{1,2}^{(\prime)}$ which are induced by neutral Higgs boson (NHB) penguins, we evaluate some possible observables associated with these processes like, the invariant mass spectrum (IMS), lepton pair forward backward asymmetry (FBA), lepton polarization asymmetries etc. In this model the contributions from Wilson coefficients $C_{Q_{1,2}}^\prime$, among new contributions, are dominant. Our results show that the NHB effects are sensitive to the FBA, $dL/d\hat{s}$, and $dT/d\hat{s}$ of $B \to K^{(*)} \tau^+ \tau^-$ decay, which are expected to be measured in B factories, and the average of the normal polarization $dN/d\hat{s}$ can reach several percent for $B \to K \mu^+ \mu^-$ and it is 0.05 or so for $B\to K \tau^+\tau^-$, which could be measured in the future super B factories and provide a useful information to probe new physics and discriminate different models.Comment: 16 pages,7 figure

Mass and Age of Red Giant Branch Stars Observed with LAMOST and \emph{Kepler}

Obtaining accurate and precise masses and ages for large numbers of giant stars is of great importance for unraveling the assemblage history of the Galaxy. In this paper, we estimate masses and ages of 6940 red giant branch (RGB) stars with asteroseismic parameters deduced from \emph{Kepler} photometry and stellar atmospheric parameters derived from LAMOST spectra. The typical uncertainties of mass is a few per cent, and that of age is $\sim$\,20 per cent. The sample stars reveal two separate sequences in the age -- [$\alpha$/Fe] relation -- a high--$\alpha$ sequence with stars older than $\sim$\,8\,Gyr and a low--$\alpha$ sequence composed of stars with ages ranging from younger than 1\,Gyr to older than 11\,Gyr. We further investigate the feasibility of deducing ages and masses directly from LAMOST spectra with a machine learning method based on kernel based principal component analysis, taking a sub-sample of these RGB stars as a training data set. We demonstrate that ages thus derived achieve an accuracy of $\sim$\,24 per cent. We also explored the feasibility of estimating ages and masses based on the spectroscopically measured carbon and nitrogen abundances. The results are quite satisfactory and significantly improved compared to the previous studies.Comment: accepted by MNRA

Time-invariant entanglement and sudden death of non-locality

We investigate both theoretically and experimentally the dynamics of entanglement and non-locality for two qubits immersed in a global pure dephasing environment. We demonstrate the existence of a class of states for which entanglement is forever frozen during the dynamics, even if the state of the system does evolve. At the same time non-local correlations, quantified by the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality, either undergo sudden death or are trapped during the dynamics.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure