Maximal quantum randomness in Bell tests

The non-local correlations exhibited when measuring entangled particles can be used to certify the presence of genuine randomness in Bell experiments. While non-locality is necessary for randomness certification, it is unclear when and why non-locality certifies maximal randomness. We provide here a simple argument to certify the presence of maximal local and global randomness based on symmetries of a Bell inequality and the existence of a unique quantum probability distribution that maximally violates it. Using our findings, we prove the existence of N-party Bell test attaining maximal global randomness, that is, where a combination of measurements by each party provides N perfect random bits.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Entanglement and non local correlations: quantum resources for information processing

Quantum Information Theory (QIT) studies how information can be processed and transmitted when encoded on quantum states. Practically, it can be understood as the effort to generalize Classical Information Theory to the quantum world. Interestingly, the fact that very-small scale Physics differs considerably from that of macroscopic objects offers a richer structure to the new theory. Among other phenomena, entanglement is at the heart of many quantum information protocols. It is the most spectacular and counter-intuitive manifestation of quantum mechanics: it signifies the existence of non-local correlations. Although intrinsically non-intuitive, these strange effects have been shown to lead to intriguing applications with no classical analogue. The main scope of this thesis is to establish qualitative and quantitative connections among the different quantum and classical information resources. Among the many weird effects that quantum systems present, the non-additivity concept plays an important role. In the quantum realm, the joint processing of two quantum resources is often better than the sum of the two resources. Activation is the strongest manifestation of non-additivity. It can be understood as the capability of two objects to achieve a given task that is impossible for each of them when considered individually. From a classical point of view, it is unknown whether such a process can hold. Here we focus on the classical secret-key rate. We provide two probability distributions conjectured to have bound information, hence from which it is conjectured that no secret key can be extracted when taken individually, but that lead to a positive secret-key rate when combined. For that, we exploit the close connection between the information-theoretic key agreement and the quantum entanglement scenario. Successively, we move to the multipartite scenario showing a one-to-one correspondence between bound information and bound entanglement. We provide an example of multipartite bound information which shares the same features of its quantum analogue, the Smolin state. Later, we move to prove a deep connection between privacy and non-locality. We do it by showing that all private states violate the Bell-CHSH inequality. Private states are those entangled states from which a perfectly secure cryptographic key can be extracted. An example of those is the maximally entangled state. But still, there are other private states that are not maximally entangled. While a maximally entangled state violates a Bell's inequality, this is not known a priori for the whole set. We give a general proof valid for any dimension and any number of parties. Private states, then, not only represent the unit of quantum privacy, but also allow two distant parties to establish a different quantum resource, namely non-local correlations. Lastly, we tackle the connection between non-locality and genuine randomness. Non-locality and genuine intrinsic randomness have been the subject of active interest since the early days of quantum physics. Initially, this interest was mainly derived from their foundational and fundamental implications but recently it also has acquired a practical aspect. Recent development in device independent scenario have heightened the need to quantify both the randomness and non-locality inherent in quantum systems. While some works try to deepen this relation, we provide a simple method to detect Bell tests that allow the certification of maximal randomness. These arguments exploit the symmetries of Bell inequalities and assume the uniqueness of the quantum probability distribution maximally violating it. We show how these arguments can be applied to intuit the randomness intrinsic in a probability distribution without resorting to numerical calculations.La Teoría de la Información Cuántica (QIT) estudia como la información puede ser procesada y transmitida al codificarse en estados cuánticos. Prácticamente, se puede pensar como la generalización de la Teoría de Información Clásica al mundo cuántico. El hecho que la física a esta escala difiera considerablemente de aquella de los objetos macroscópicos ofrece una mayor riqueza a la estructura de la nueva teoría. Entre otros fenómenos, el entrelazamiento está a la base de muchos protocolos cuánticos. Es la más espectacular y anti-intuitiva manifestación de la mecánica cuántica observada en sistemas cuánticos compuestos: implica la existencia de correlaciones no-locales. No obstante la extrañeza de estos efectos, se han demostrado distintas aplicaciones sin ningún análogo clásico. El objetivo de esta tesis es establecer conexiones cualitativas y cuantitativas entre los diferentes recursos descritos por la teoría cuántica y clásica. Entre los efectos raros que los sistemas cuánticos muestran, la no-aditividad desempeña un papel muy importante. En el mundo cuántico, el uso de dos recursos cuánticos puede ser más ventajoso que la suma de los dos, considerados individualmente. La activación es la mas fuerte manifestación del fenómeno de no-aditividad. Este proceso se puede entender como la capacidad de dos objetos juntos de lograr una tarea que sería imposible por cada uno de ellos singularmente. Desde un punto de vista clásico, es desconocido si existen procesos o cantidades que no respetan la aditividad. Aquí, nos centramos en la tasa de clave secreta. Presentamos aquí dos distribuciones de probabilidad que conjeturamos contener bound information, o sea a partir de la cuales es imposible destilar bits secretos que dan bits secretos cuando utilizadas conjuntamente. Para probar este resultado, utilizamos la conexión existente entre entrelazamiento y el proceso de establecimiento de seguridad. Sucesivamente desplazándonos al caso multipartito, probamos una correspondencia uno a uno entre la bound information y el entrelazamiento no-destilable. Presentamos un ejemplo de bound information multipartita que comparte las mismas propiedades de su análogo cuántico, el estado de Smolin. Luego profundizamos la relación entre privacidad y no-localidad. Probamos que todos los estados que pertenecen al conjunto de estados privados violan una desigualdad de Bell, conocida como CHSH. Los estados privados son aquellos estados entrelazados de los cuales es posible extraer una clave secreta. Un ejemplo de estos estados es el estado máximamente entrelazado, pero hay otros que son privados aunque no máximamente entrelazados. Es conocido que un estado máximamente entrelazado puede violar una desigualdad de Bell, pero lo que se desconoce es si esto pasa para todos los estados privados. Nuestro resultado es general ya que nuestra prueba es válida para cualquier número de partes y cualquier dimensión del espacio local de cada una. Los estados privados, entonces, no solo permiten destilar una clave de forma segura sino que también presentan una propiedad tan fuerte como la no-localidad. Finalmente, investigamos la relación entre los conceptos de no-localidad y de aleatoriedad. Desde los orígenes de la teoría cuántica, los conceptos de no-localidad y de aleatoriedad fueron objeto de gran interés. A principio este interés se debía más a razones relacionadas con los fundamentos de la teoría, pero recientes resultados han empujado la comunidad científica a investigar ulteriormente y sobre todo a cuantificar la no-localidad y la aleatoriedad presente en los estados cuánticos. Aunque algunos autores se hayan movido en esta direccion, muchas preguntas han quedado sin respuestas. Aquí presentamos un simple método que permite detectar aquellas desigualdades de Bell que pueden certificar la presencia de máxima aleatoriedad. Nuestros resultados prueban como simples argumentos pueden dar complejas respuestas sin la necesidad de recorrer a computaciones numéricas

Hot weather and residential hourly electricity demand in Italy

Concerns about climate change, pollution and energy security have prompted policies aiming at replacing fossil fuels (in heating and cooling, and transportation) with electricity, presumably generated from renewable sources. Climate change itself is expected to increase the demand for cooling in buildings, which is generally met with electricity-powered air conditioning. We use hourly electricity demand from a sample of Italian residences over a full year to examine how sensitive residential demand is to temperature. Our regression model includes a rich set of household-by-time fixed effects to control for dwelling characteristics and equipment, family composition, work and business schedules, demand for lighting, and seasonal habits other than temperature. These allows us to separate the effect of temperature from the demand for lighting and from other seasonal effects that may be correlated with temperature, but are not temperature. We find that demand stays within a relatively narrow range (and is thus relatively flat) up to temperatures of about 24.4° C, and increases sharply with temperature thereafter. We find that temperature accounts for a very small share of daily electricity demand. Only on exceptionally hot summer days can temperature account for 12% of hourly electricity use

SMART GRIDS LABORATORIES INVENTORY 2016

The smart grid implies that a vast amount of information needs to be handled and requires an effective energy management. Assessing the new technological solutions that would best accommodate the needs of a smart grid is of vital importance. This report aims at collecting information about the smart grid topics of research, the technologies and the standards used by top organizations that hold smart grid activities at a laboratory level. For this purpose an online questionnaire has been used. The report presents aggregated results that give an insight into the state-of-the-art regarding the smart grid field.JRC.C.3-Energy Security, Distribution and Market

Distribution Network Model Platform: A First Case Study

Decarbonisation policies have recently seen an uncontrolled increase in local electricity production from renewable energy sources (RES) at distribution level. As a consequence, bidirectional power flows might cause high voltage/ medium voltage (HV/MV) transformers to overload. Additionally, not-well-planned installation of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations could provoke voltage deviations and cables overloading during peak times. To ensure secure and reliable distribution network operations, technology integration requires careful analysis which is based on realistic distribution grid models (DGM). Currently, however, only not geo-referenced synthetic grids are available inliterature. This fact unfortunately represents a big limitation. In order to overcome this knowledge gap, we developed a distribution network model (DiNeMo) web-platform aiming at reproducing the DGM of a given area of interest. DiNeMo is based on metrics and indicators collected from 99 unbundled distribution system operators (DSOs) in Europe. In this work we firstly perform a validation exercise on two DGMs of the city of Varaždin in Croatia. To this aim, a set of indicators from the DGMs and from the real networks are compared. The DGMs are later used for a power flow analysis which focuses on voltage fluctuations, line losses, and lines loading considering different levels of EV charging stations penetration

Distribution Network Models platform guideline

The Distribution Network Model (DiNeMo) is the collaborative platform where it is possible to model the electricity distribution grids of your community, city or region. This document provide a helpful guideline to the user.JRC.C.3-Energy Security, Distribution and Market

Reducing fossil fuel-based generation: Impact on wholesale electricity market prices in the North-Italy bidding zone

Decarbonisation policies aim at reducing fossil fuel based generation in favour of cleaner renewable energy sources. Changes in the generation mix to supply future electricity demand will require tools capable to emulate the bidding behaviour of new generation plants. Price forecasting tools lacking this feature and only based on historical data time series might soon become not satisfactory for this scope. This paper presents a methodology that, by considering hourly electricity generation offers (price, volumes) datasets, allows simulating future electricity wholesale’s prices. This is done by taking into account new generation units and the dismissing of old (coal-based) units according to the demand and generation forecasts in the European Ten Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) 2030 scenarios. Machine learning, clustering and distribution sampling techniques are used in this work to finally estimate prices distribution in 2030 in the biggest bidding zone of the Italian market. The results suggest that the prices obtained in the different scenarios do converge to those estimated by the TYNDP. The approach used bypasses the need to have access to all the transactions of a given market. Probability distributions are in fact enough in the proposed methodology to achieve similar results to those based on full knowledge of transaction datasets

Perfect Quantum Privacy Implies Nonlocality

Private states are those quantum states from which a perfectly secure cryptographic key can be extracted. They represent the basic unit of quantum privacy. In this work we show that all states belonging to this class violate a Bell inequality. This result establishes a connection between perfect privacy and nonlocality in the quantum domain.Comment: 4 pages, published versio