QIC Abstracts

 Vol.12 No.9&10, September 1, 2012

Research Articles:

Criteria for measures of quantum correlations (pp0721-0742)
          
Aharon Brodutch and Kavan Modi

Entanglement does not describe all quantum correlations and several authors have shown the need to go beyond entanglement when dealing with mixed states. Various different measures have sprung up in the literature, for a variety of reasons, to describe bipartite and multipartite quantum correlations; some are known under the collective name {\it quantum discord}. Yet, in the same sprit as the criteria for entanglement measures, there is no general mechanism that determines whether a measure of quantum and classical correlations is a proper measure of correlations. This is partially due to the fact that the answer is a bit muddy. In this article we attempt tackle this muddy topic by writing down several criteria for a ``good" measure of correlations. We breakup our list into \emph{necessary}, \emph{reasonable}, and \emph{debatable} conditions. We then proceed to prove several of these conditions for generalized measures of quantum correlations. However, not all conditions are met by all measures; we show this via several examples. The reasonable conditions are related to continuity of correlations, which has not been previously discussed. Continuity is an important quality if one wants to probe quantum correlations in the laboratory. We show that most types of quantum discord are continuous but none are continuous with respect to the measurement basis used for optimization.

Number-phase uncertainty relations in terms of generalized entropies (pp0743-0762)
          
Alexey E. Rastegin
Number-phase uncertainty relations are formulated in terms of unified entropies which form a family of two-parametric extensions of the Shannon entropy. For two generalized measurements, unified-entropy uncertainty relations are given in both the state-dependent and state-independent forms. A few examples are discussed as well. Using the Pegg--Barnett formalism and the Riesz theorem, we obtain a nontrivial inequality between norm-like functionals of generated
probability distributions in finite dimensions. The principal point is that we take the infinite-dimensional limit right for this inequality. Hence number-phase uncertainty relations with finite phase resolutions are expressed in terms of the unified entropies. Especially important case of multiphoton coherent states is separately considered. We also give some entropic bounds in which the corresponding integrals of probability density functions are involved.

Application of indirect Hamiltonian tomography to complex systems with short coherence times (pp0763-0774)
          
Koji Maruyama, Daniel Burgarth, Akihito Ishizaki, Takeji Takui, and K. Birgitta Whaley
The identification of parameters in the Hamiltonian that describes complex many-body quantum systems is generally a very hard task. Recent attention has focused on such problems of Hamiltonian tomography for networks constructed with two-level systems. For open quantum systems, the fact that injected signals are likely to decay before they accumulate sufficient information for parameter estimation poses additional challenges. In this paper, we consider use of the gateway approach to Hamiltonian tomography \cite{Burgarth2009,Burgarth2009a} to complex quantum systems with a limited set of state preparation and measurement probes. We classify graph properties of networks for which the Hamiltonian may be estimated under equivalent conditions on state preparation and measurement. We then examine the extent to which the gateway approach may be applied to estimation of Hamiltonian parameters for network graphs with non-trivial topologies mimicking biomolecular systems.

Local solutions of maximum likelihood estimation in quantum state tomography (pp0775-0790)
          
Douglas S. Goncalves, Marcia A. Gomes-Ruggiero, Carlile Lavor, Osvaldo J. Farias, and P. H. Souto Ribeiro
Maximum likelihood estimation is one of the most used methods in quantum state tomography, where the aim is to reconstruct the density matrix of a physical system from measurement results. One strategy to deal with positivity and unit trace constraints is to parameterize the matrix to be reconstructed in order to ensure that it is physical. In this case, the negative log-likelihood function in terms of the parameters, may have several local minima. In various papers in the field, a source of errors in this process has been associated to the possibility that most of these local minima are not global, so that optimization methods could be trapped in the wrong minimum, leading to a wrong density matrix. Here we show that, for convex negative log-likelihood functions, all local minima of the unconstrained parameterized problem are global, thus any minimizer leads to the maximum likelihood estimation for the density matrix. We also discuss some practical sources of errors.

Blind reconciliation (pp0791-0812)
          
Jesus Martinez-Mateo, David Elkouss, and Vicente Martin
Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily interactive procedures, like \textit{Cascade}, or using less efficient but also less interactive ---just one message is exchanged--- procedures, like the ones based in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, \textit{blind}, protocol that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that $2 \times 10^3$ bits length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with very high throughput.

Quantum codes from codes over Gaussian integers with respect to the Mannheim metric (pp0813-0819)
          
Mehmet Ozen and Murat Guzeltepe
In this paper, some nonbinary quantum codes using classical codes over Gaussian integers are obtained. Also, some of our quantum codes are better than or comparable with those known before, (for instance $[[8,2,5]]_{4+i}$).

On nonbinary quantum convolutional BCH codes (pp0820-0842)
          
Giuliano G. La Guardia

Several new families of nonbinary quantum convolutional Bose-Chaud-huri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes are constructed in this paper. These code constructions are performed algebraically and not by computation search. The quantum convolutional codes constructed here have parameters better than the ones available in the literature and they have non-catastrophic encoders and encoder inverses. These new families consist of unit-memory as well as multi-memory convolutional stabilizer codes.

Quantum algorithms for invariants of triangulated manifolds (pp0843-0863)
          
Gorjan Alagic and Edgar A. Bering IV

One of the apparent advantages of quantum computers over their classical counterparts is their ability to efficiently contract tensor networks. In this article, we study some implications of this fact in the case of topological tensor networks. The graph underlying these networks is given by the triangulation of a manifold, and the structure of the tensors ensures that the overall tensor is independent of the choice of internal triangulation. This leads to quantum algorithms for additively approximating certain invariants of triangulated manifolds. We discuss the details of this construction in two specific cases. In the first case, we consider triangulated surfaces, where the triangle tensor is defined by the multiplication operator of a finite group; the resulting invariant has a simple closed-form expression involving the dimensions of the irreducible representations of the group and the Euler characteristic of the surface. In the second case, we consider triangulated 3-manifolds, where the tetrahedral tensor is defined by the so-called Fibonacci anyon model; the resulting invariant is the well-known Turaev-Viro invariant of 3-manifolds.

Quantum phase estimation with arbitrary constant-precision phase shift operators (pp0864-0875)
          
Hamed Ahmadi and Chen-Fu Chiang

While Quantum phase estimation (QPE) is at the core of many quantum algorithms known to date, its physical implementation (algorithms based on quantum Fourier transform (QFT) ) is highly constrained by the requirement of high-precision controlled phase shift operators, which remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach to approximately implement QPE with arbitrary constant-precision controlled phase shift operators. The new quantum algorithm bridges the gap between QPE algorithms based on QFT and Kitaev's original approach. For approximating the eigenphase precise to the nth bit, Kitaev's original approach does not require any controlled phase shift operator. In contrast, QPE algorithms based on QFT or approximate QFT require controlled phase shift operators with precision of at least Pi/2n. The new approach fills the gap and requires only arbitrary constant-precision controlled phase shift operators. From a physical implementation viewpoint, the new algorithm outperforms Kitaev's approach.

Systematic distillation of composite Fibonacci anyons using one mobile quasiparticle (pp0876-0892)
          
Ben W. Reichardt

A topological quantum computer should allow intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation, but there remains uncertainty about how such a computer can be implemented. It is known that topological quantum computation can be implemented with limited quasiparticle braiding capabilities, in fact using only a single mobile quasiparticle, if the system can be properly initialized by measurements. It is also known that measurements alone suffice without any braiding, provided that the measurement devices can be dynamically created and modified. We study a model in which both measurement and braiding capabilities are limited. Given the ability to pull nontrivial Fibonacci anyon pairs from the vacuum with a certain success probability, we show how to simulate universal quantum computation by braiding one quasiparticle and with only one measurement, to read out the result. The difficulty lies in initializing the system. We give a systematic construction of a family of braid sequences that initialize to arbitrary accuracy nontrivial composite anyons. Instead of using the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, the sequences are based on a quantum algorithm for convergent search.

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