Experimental observation of impossible-to-beat quantum advantage on a hybrid photonic system

Quantum resources outperform classical ones for certain communication and computational tasks. Remarkably, in some cases, the quantum advantage cannot be improved using hypothetical postquantum resources. A class of tasks with this property can be singled out using graph theory. Here we report the experimental observation of an impossible-to-beat quantum advantage on a four-dimensional quantum system defined by the polarization and orbital angular momentum of a single photon. The results show pristine evidence of the quantum advantage and are compatible with the maximum advantage allowed using postquantum resources.Comment: REVTeX4, 5 pages, 2 figure

Quantum Convolutional BCH Codes

Quantum convolutional codes can be used to protect a sequence of qubits of arbitrary length against decoherence. We introduce two new families of quantum convolutional codes. Our construction is based on an algebraic method which allows to construct classical convolutional codes from block codes, in particular BCH codes. These codes have the property that they contain their Euclidean, respectively Hermitian, dual codes. Hence, they can be used to define quantum convolutional codes by the stabilizer code construction. We compute BCH-like bounds on the free distances which can be controlled as in the case of block codes, and establish that the codes have non-catastrophic encoders.Comment: 4 pages, minor changes, accepted for publication at the 10th Canadian Workshop on Information Theory (CWIT'07

Engineering Functional Quantum Algorithms

Suppose that a quantum circuit with K elementary gates is known for a unitary matrix U, and assume that U^m is a scalar matrix for some positive integer m. We show that a function of U can be realized on a quantum computer with at most O(mK+m^2log m) elementary gates. The functions of U are realized by a generic quantum circuit, which has a particularly simple structure. Among other results, we obtain efficient circuits for the fractional Fourier transform.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure