Entanglement-Assisted Absorption Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is an important tool for probing the properties of materials, chemicals and biological samples. We design a practical transmitter-receiver system that exploits entanglement to achieve a provable quantum advantage over all spectroscopic schemes based on classical sources. To probe the absorption spectra, modelled as pattern of transmissivities among different frequency modes, we employ broad-band signal-idler pairs in two-mode squeezed vacuum states. At the receiver side, we apply photodetection after optical parametric amplification. Finally, we perform a maximal-likehihood decision test on the measurement results, achieving orders-of-magnitude-lower error probability than the optimum classical systems in various examples, including `wine-tasting' and `drug-testing' where real molecules are considered. In detecting the presence of an absorption line, our quantum scheme achieves the optimum performance allowed by quantum mechanics. The quantum advantage in our system is robust against noise and loss, which makes near-term experimental demonstration possible

Development of online education and its applicationin Shanghai Maritime University

Online teaching is becoming an important alternative approach to maritime education, which traditionally relies on face-to-face instruction, particularly during the period when the COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the educational system worldwide. On the base of the conceptualization of online education through a literature review, this study demonstrates the case of an innovative online teaching system developed and implemented by Shanghai Maritime University (SMU) that successfully allowed some 20,000 students to resume learning despite the COVID-19 disruption. To realize large-scale online teaching, four phases of development the SMU underwent are introduced. The whole process of planning, preparation, implementation as well as evaluation is elaborated. In addition to class teaching, other major activities delivered remotely are also introduced, including short-term training programs, graduation ceremony, online career fairs, online interviews for postgraduate admission. Difficulties and challenges in shifting to the new teaching method and how SMU developed effective strategies to solve these issues are addressed. This study provides a valuable example of an online teaching system realized in a maritime institution. Furthermore, it may serve as an inspirational reference to peer maritime institutions to adopt or improve their competence of online learning systems

Optimal entanglement-assisted electromagnetic sensing and communication in the presence of noise

High time-bandwidth product signal and idler pulses comprised of independent identically distributed two-mode squeezed vacuum (TMSV) states are readily produced by spontaneous parametric downconversion. These pulses are virtually unique among entangled states in that they offer quantum performance advantages -- over their best classical-state competitors -- in scenarios whose loss and noise break their initial entanglement. Broadband TMSV states' quantum advantage derives from its signal and idler having a strongly nonclassical phase-sensitive cross correlation, which leads to information bearing signatures in lossy, noisy scenarios stronger than what can be obtained from classical-state systems of the same transmitted energy. Previous broadband TMSV receiver architectures focused on converting phase-sensitive cross correlation into phase-insensitive cross correlation, which can be measured in second-order interference. In general, however, these receivers fail to deliver broadband TMSV states' full quantum advantage, even if they are implemented with ideal equipment. This paper introduces the correlation-to-displacement receiver -- a new architecture comprised of a correlation-to-displacement converter, a programmable mode selector, and a coherent-state information extractor -- that can be configured to achieve quantum optimal performance in known sensing and communication protocols for which broadband TMSV provides quantum advantage that is robust against entanglement-breaking loss and noise.Comment: 14+17 pages, 12+9 figures. A preliminary version of the manuscript can be found in arXiv:2207.0660

Entanglement-assisted capacity regions and protocol designs for quantum multiple-access channels

We solve the entanglement-assisted (EA) classical capacity region of quantum multiple-access channels with an arbitrary number of senders. As an example, we consider the bosonic thermal-loss multiple-access channel and solve the one-shot capacity region enabled by an entanglement source composed of sender-receiver pairwise two-mode squeezed vacuum states. The EA capacity region is strictly larger than the capacity region without entanglement-assistance. With two-mode squeezed vacuum states as the source and phase modulation as the encoding, we also design practical receiver protocols to realize the entanglement advantages. Four practical receiver designs, based on optical parametric amplifiers, are given and analyzed. In the parameter region of a large noise background, the receivers can enable a simultaneous rate advantage of 82.0% for each sender. Due to teleportation and superdense coding, our results for EA classical communication can be directly extended to EA quantum communication at half of the rates. Our work provides a unique and practical network communication scenario where entanglement can be beneficial.Comment: 8+10 pages, 11 figures, accepted by npj Quantum In

Parallel finite volume simulation of the spherical shell dynamo with pseudo-vacuum magnetic boundary conditions

In this paper, we study the parallel simulation of the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) dynamo in a rapidly rotating spherical shell with pseudo-vacuum magnetic boundary conditions. A second-order finite volume scheme based on a collocated quasi-uniform cubed-sphere grid is applied to the spatial discretization of the MHD dynamo equations. To ensure the solenoidal condition of the magnetic field, we adopt a widely-used approach whereby a pseudo-pressure is introduced into the induction equation. The temporal integration is split by a second-order approximate factorization approach, resulting in two linear algebraic systems both solved by a preconditioned Krylov subspace iterative method. A multi-level restricted additive Schwarz preconditioner based on domain decomposition and multigrid method is then designed to improve the efficiency and scalability. Accurate numerical solutions of two benchmark cases are obtained with our code, comparable to the existing local method results. Several large-scale tests performed on the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer show good strong and weak scalabilities and a noticeable improvement from the multi-level preconditioner with up to 10368 processor cores

Practical route to entanglement-assisted communication over noisy bosonic channels

Entanglement offers substantial advantages in quantum information processing, but loss and noise hinder its applications in practical scenarios. Although it has been well known for decades that the classical communication capacity over lossy and noisy bosonic channels can be significantly enhanced by entanglement, no practical encoding and decoding schemes are available to realize any entanglement-enabled advantage. Here, we report structured encoding and decoding schemes for such an entanglement-assisted communication scenario. Specifically, we show that phase encoding on the entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum state saturates the entanglement-assisted classical communication capacity over a very noisy channel and overcomes the fundamental limit of covert communication without entanglement assistance. We then construct receivers for optimum hypothesis testing protocols under discrete phase modulation and for optimum noisy phase estimation protocols under continuous phase modulation. Our results pave the way for entanglement-assisted communication and sensing in the radio-frequency and microwave spectral ranges.Comment: 10+6 pages, 13 figures; Close to the published versio

Consensus Graph Representation Learning for Better Grounded Image Captioning

The contemporary visual captioning models frequently hallucinate objects that are not actually in a scene, due to the visual misclassification or over-reliance on priors that resulting in the semantic inconsistency between the visual information and the target lexical words. The most common way is to encourage the captioning model to dynamically link generated object words or phrases to appropriate regions of the image, i.e., the grounded image captioning (GIC). However, GIC utilizes an auxiliary task (grounding objects) that has not solved the key issue of object hallucination, i.e., the semantic inconsistency. In this paper, we take a novel perspective on the issue above - exploiting the semantic coherency between the visual and language modalities. Specifically, we propose the Consensus Rraph Representation Learning framework (CGRL) for GIC that incorporates a consensus representation into the grounded captioning pipeline. The consensus is learned by aligning the visual graph (e.g., scene graph) to the language graph that consider both the nodes and edges in a graph. With the aligned consensus, the captioning model can capture both the correct linguistic characteristics and visual relevance, and then grounding appropriate image regions further. We validate the effectiveness of our model, with a significant decline in object hallucination (-9% CHAIRi) on the Flickr30k Entities dataset. Besides, our CGRL also evaluated by several automatic metrics and human evaluation, the results indicate that the proposed approach can simultaneously improve the performance of image captioning (+2.9 Cider) and grounding (+2.3 F1LOC).Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, AAAI 202

Entanglement-Assisted Communication Surpassing the Ultimate Classical Capacity

Entanglement underpins a variety of quantum-enhanced communication, sensing, and computing capabilities. Entanglement-assisted communication (EACOMM) leverages entanglement pre-shared by communication parties to boost the rate of classical information transmission. Pioneering theory works showed that EACOMM can enable a communication rate well beyond the ultimate classical capacity of optical communications, but an experimental demonstration of any EACOMM advantage remains elusive. Here, we report the implementation of EACOMM surpassing the classical capacity over lossy and noisy bosonic channels. We construct a high-efficiency entanglement source and a phase-conjugate quantum receiver to reap the benefit of pre-shared entanglement, despite entanglement being broken by channel loss and noise. We show that EACOMM beats the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland capacity of classical communication by up to 14.6%, when both protocols are subject to the same power constraint at the transmitter. As a practical performance benchmark, a classical communication protocol without entanglement assistance is implemented, showing that EACOMM can reduce the bit-error rate by up to 69% over the same bosonic channel. Our work opens a route to provable quantum advantages in a wide range of quantum information processing tasks.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. Comments are welcom