International Journal of Quantum Information

It is a central trait of quantum information theory that there exist limitations to the free sharing of quantum correlations among multiple parties. Such monogamy constraints have been introduced in a landmark paper by Coffman, Kundu and Wootters, who derived a quantitative inequality expressing a trade-off between the couplewise and the genuine tripartite entanglement for states of three qubits. Since then, a lot of efforts have been devoted to the investigation of distributed entanglement in multipartite quantum systems. In this paper we report, in a unifying framework, a bird's eye view of the most relevant results that have been established so far on entanglement sharing in quantum systems. We will take off from the domain of N qubits, graze qudits, and finally land in the almost unexplored territory of multimode Gaussian states of continuous variable systems.

Two non-interacting systems immersed in a common bath and evolving with a Markovian, completely positive dynamics can become initially entangled via a purely noisy mechanism. Remarkably, for certain phenomenologically relevant environments, the quantum correlations can persist even in the asymptotic long-time regime.

We present a communication protocol for chains of permanently coupled qubits which achieves perfect quantum state transfer and which is efficient with respect to the number of chains employed in the scheme. The system consists of M uncoupled identical quantum chains. Local control (gates, measurements) is only allowed at the sending/receiving end of the chains. Under a quite general hypothesis on the interaction Hamiltonian of the qubits, a theorem can be proved which shows that the receiver is able to asymptotically recover the messages by repetitive monitoring of his qubits. We show how two parallel Heisenberg spin chains can be used as quantum wires. Perfect state transfer with a probability of failure lower than P in a Heisenberg chain of N spin-1/2 particles can be achieved in a time scale of the order of .

We consider generalizations of the dense coding protocol with an arbitrary number of senders and either one or two receivers, sharing a multiparty quantum state, and using a noiseless channel. For the case of a single receiver, the capacity of such information transfer is found exactly. It is shown that the capacity is not enhanced by allowing the senders to perform joint operations. We provide a nontrivial upper bound on the capacity in the case of two receivers. We also give a classification of the set of all multiparty states in terms of their usefulness for dense coding. We provide examples for each of these classes, and discuss some of their properties.

We give a pedagogical and non-technical introduction to the quantum field theory approach to entanglement entropy. Particular attention is devoted to the one space dimensional case, with a linear dispersion relation, that, at a quantum critical point, can be effectively described by a two-dimensional conformal field theory.

Gaussian quantum channels have recently attracted a growing interest, since they may lead to a tractable approach to the generally hard problem of evaluating quantum channel capacities. However, the analysis performed so far has always been restricted to memoryless channels. Here, we consider the case of a bosonic Gaussian channel with memory, and show that the classical capacity can be significantly enhanced by employing entangled input symbols instead of product symbols.

The maximum likelihood strategy for the estimation of group parameters allows one to derive in a general fashion optimal measurements, optimal signal states, and their relations with other information theoretical quantities. These results provide deep insight into the general structure underlying optimal quantum estimation strategies. The entanglement between representation spaces and multiplicity spaces of the group action appears to be the unique kind of entanglement which is really useful for the optimal estimation of group parameters.

We prove additivity of the minimum output entropy and the Holevo capacity for rotationally invariant quantum channels acting on spin-1/2 and spin-1 systems. The physical significance of these channels and their relations to other known channels is also discussed.

We analyze the effects of noise on quantum cloning based on the spin network approach. A noisy environment interacting with the spin network is modeled both in a classical scenario, with a classical fluctuating field, and in a fully quantum scenario, in which the spins are coupled with a bath of harmonic oscillators. We compare the realization of cloning with spin networks and with traditional quantum gates in the presence of noise, and show that spin network cloning is more robust.

We report the first experimental realizations of the 1 → M universal cloning machine. Two approaches are carefully described: the adoption of a state symmetrization linear optical procedure and of the quantum injected optical parametric amplifier. Furthermore, this device is adopted to generate optimally distinguishable multi-photon quantum superposition states.

We introduce a general scheme to realize perfect quantum state reconstruction and storage in systems of interacting qubits. This novel approach is based on the idea of controlling the residual interactions by suitable external controls that, acting on the inter-qubit couplings, yield time-periodic inversions in the dynamical evolution, thus cancelling exactly the effects of quantum state diffusion. We illustrate the method for spin systems on closed rings with XY residual interactions, showing that it enables the massive storage of arbitrarily large numbers of local states, and we demonstrate its robustness against several realistic sources of noise and imperfections.

We discuss simple protocols to realize state transfer with high fidelity in Josephson junction arrays. We consider both the cases of constant and properly modulated couplings between the site of the chain. We investigate the influence of static disorder both in the Josephson energies and in the coupling to the background gate charges and we show that they can lead to a fractal fidelity. We also analyze the readout process, and its backaction on the state transfer.

We present a method to construct entanglement measures for pure states of multipartite qubit systems. The key element of our approach is an antilinear operator that we call comb in reference to the hairy-ball theorem. For qubits (i.e. spin 1/2) the combs are automatically invariant under SL (2, ℂ). This implies that the filters obtained from the combs are entanglement monotones by construction. We give alternative formulae for the concurrence and the 3-tangle as expectation values of certain antilinear operators. As an application we discuss inequivalent types of genuine four-, five- and six-qubit entanglement.

The entanglement properties of some novel quantum systems are studied that are inspired by recent developments in cold-atom technology. A triangular optical lattice of two atomic species can be employed to generate a variety of spin-1/2 Hamiltonians including effective three-spin interactions. A variety of one- or two-dimensional systems can thus be realized that possess multi-degenerate ground states or non-vanishing chirality. The properties of these ground states and their phase transitions are probed with appropriate measures such as the entropic entanglement and the spin chirality.

Distributed quantum information processing (QIP) is a promising way to bypass problems due to unwanted interactions between elements. However, this strategy presupposes the engineering of protocols for remote processors. In many of them, pairwise entanglement is a key resource. We study a model which distributes entanglement among elements of a delocalized network without local control. The model is efficient both in finite- and infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. We suggest a setup of electromechanical systems to implement our proposal.

We show how defects in a spin chain described by the XXZ model may be used to generate entangled states, such as Bell and W states, and how to maintain them with high fidelity. We also discuss, in the presence of several excitations, how the anisotropy of the system may be combined with defects to effectively assist in the creation of the desired states.

We introduce the idea of a quantum walk with two particles and study it for the case of a discrete time walk on a line. We consider both separable and maximally entangled initial conditions, and show how the entanglement and the relative phase between the states describing the coin degree of freedom of each particle will influence the evolution of the quantum walk. In particular, these factors will have consequences for the distance between the particles and the probability of finding them at a given point, yielding results that cannot be obtained from a separable initial state, be it pure or mixed. Finally, we review briefly proposals for implementations.