Randomness-free Test of Non-classicality: a Proof of Concept

Quantum correlations and non-projective measurements underlie a plethora of information-theoretic tasks, otherwise impossible in the classical world. Existing schemes to certify such non-classical resources in a device-independent manner require seed randomness -- which is often costly and vulnerable to loopholes -- for choosing the local measurements performed on different parts of a multipartite quantum system. In this letter, we propose and experimentally implement a semi-device independent certification technique for both quantum correlations and non-projective measurements without seed randomness. Our test is {\it semi-device independent} in the sense that it requires only prior knowledge of the dimension of the parts. By producing specific correlated coins from pairs of photons entangled in their transverse spatial modes we experimentally show a novel quantum advantage in correlated coin tossing. We establish the advantage by showing that the correlated coin procured from the entangled photons cannot be obtained from any two 2-level classical correlated coins. The quantum advantage requires performing qubit trine positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on each part of the entangled pair, thus also certifying such POVMs in a semi-device-independent manner. This proof of concept firmly establishes a new cost-effective certification technique for both, generating non-classical shared randomness and implementing non-classical measurements which will be important for future multi-party quantum communications

Fundamental Limits to Coherent Photon Generation with Solid-State Atomlike Transitions

Coherent generation of indistinguishable single photons is crucial for many quantum communication and processing protocols. Solid-state realizations of two-level atomic transitions or three-level spin-$\Lambda$ systems offer significant advantages over their atomic counterparts for this purpose, albeit decoherence can arise due to environmental couplings. One popular approach to mitigate dephasing is to operate in the weak excitation limit, where excited state population is minimal and coherently scattered photons dominate over incoherent emission. Here we probe the coherence of photons produced using two-level and spin-$\Lambda$ solid-state systems. We observe that the coupling of the atomic-like transitions to the vibronic transitions of the crystal lattice is independent of driving strength and detuning. We apply a polaron master equation to capture the non-Markovian dynamics of the ground state vibrational manifolds. These results provide insight into the fundamental limitations for photon coherence from solid-state quantum emitters, with the consequence that deterministic single-shot quantum protocols are impossible and inherently probabilistic approaches must be embraced.Comment: 16 pages [with supplementary information], 8 figure

Efficient Quantum State Tracking in Noisy Environments

Quantum state tomography, which aims to find the best description of a quantum state -- the density matrix, is an essential building block in quantum computation and communication. Standard techniques for state tomography are incapable of tracking changing states and often perform poorly in the presence of environmental noise. Although there are different approaches to solve these problems theoretically, experimental demonstrations have so far been sparse. Our approach, matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography, is an online tomography method that allows for state tracking, updates the estimated density matrix dynamically from the very first measurements, is computationally efficient, and converges to a good estimate quickly even with noisy data. The algorithm is controlled via a single parameter, its learning rate, which determines the performance and can be tailored in simulations to the individual experiment. We present an experimental implementation of matrix-exponentiated gradient tomography on a qutrit system encoded in the transverse spatial mode of photons. We investigate the performance of our method on stationary and evolving states, as well as significant environmental noise, and find fidelities of around 95% in all cases.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure