Explicit formula for the Holevo bound for two-parameter qubit estimation problem

The main contribution of this paper is to derive an explicit expression for the fundamental precision bound, the Holevo bound, for estimating any two-parameter family of qubit mixed-states in terms of quantum versions of Fisher information. The obtained formula depends solely on the symmetric logarithmic derivative (SLD), the right logarithmic derivative (RLD) Fisher information, and a given weight matrix. This result immediately provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the following two important classes of quantum statistical models; the Holevo bound coincides with the SLD Cramer-Rao bound and it does with the RLD Cramer-Rao bound. One of the important results of this paper is that a general model other than these two special cases exhibits an unexpected property: The structure of the Holevo bound changes smoothly when the weight matrix varies. In particular, it always coincides with the RLD Cramer-Rao bound for a certain choice of the weight matrix. Several examples illustrate these findings.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures; to appear in J. Math. Phy

Critical Velocities for Energy Dissipation from Periodic Motions of Impurity in Bose-Einstein Condensates

A phenomenon of energy dissipation in Bose-Einstein condensates is studied based on a microscopic model for the motion of impurity. Critical velocities for onset of energy dissipation are obtained for periodic motions, such as a dipole-like oscillation and a circular motion. The first example is similar to a series of MIT group experiments settings where the critical velocity was observed much below the Landau critical velocity. The appearance of the smaller values for the critical velocity is also found in our model, even in the homogeneous condensate in the thermodynamic limit. This suggests that the landau criterion be reexamined in the absence of quantized vortices in the bulk limit.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Entanglement detection from channel parameter estimation problem

We derive a general criterion to detect entangled states in multi-partite systems based on the symmetric logarithmic derivative quantum Fisher information. This criterion is a direct consequence of the fact that separable states do not improve the accuracy upon estimating one-parameter family of quantum channels. Our result is a generalization of the previously known criterion for one-parameter unitary channel to any one-parameter quantum channel. We discuss several examples to illustrate our criterion. The proposed criterion is extended to the case of open quantum systems and we briefly discuss how to detect entangled states in the presence of decoherence.Comment: 10 page

Raw-data attacks in quantum cryptography with partial tomography

We consider a variant of the BB84 protocol for quantum cryptography, the prototype of tomographically incomplete protocols, where the key is generated by one-way communication rather than the usual two-way communication. Our analysis, backed by numerical evidence, establishes thresholds for eavesdropping attacks on the raw data and on the generated key at quantum bit error rates of 10% and 6.15%, respectively. Both thresholds are lower than the threshold for unconditional security in the standard BB84 protocol.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure