International Journal of Quantum Information

Quantum states that are symmetric with respect to permutations of their subsystems appear in a wide range of physical settings, and they have a variety of promising applications in quantum information science. In this thesis, the entanglement of symmetric multipartite states is categorized, with a particular focus on the pure multi-qubit case and the geometric measure of entanglement. An essential tool for this analysis is the Majorana representation, a generalization of the single-qubit Bloch sphere representation, which allows for a unique representation of symmetric n-qubit states by n points on the surface of a sphere. Here this representation is employed to search for the maximally entangled symmetric states of up to 12 qubits in terms of the geometric measure, and an intuitive visual understanding of the upper bound on the maximal symmetric entanglement is given. Furthermore, it will be seen that the Majorana representation facilitates the characterization of entanglement equivalence classes such as stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC) and the degeneracy configuration (DC). It is found that SLOCC operations between symmetric states can be described by the Möbius transformations of complex analysis, which allows for a clear visualization of the SLOCC freedoms and facilitates the understanding of SLOCC invariants and equivalence classes. In particular, explicit forms of representative states for all symmetric SLOCC classes of up to five qubits are derived. Well-known entanglement classification schemes such as the four qubit entanglement families or polynomial invariants are reviewed in the light of the results gathered here, which leads to sometimes surprising connections. Some interesting links and applications of the Majorana representation to related fields of mathematics and physics are also discussed.

We present two novel protocols for remote implementation of an unknown single-qubit operation with an EPR pair and a high-dimensional entangled state as the quantum channel, without and with quantum control. The main strategy of the protocols is teleportation of an unknown single-qubit operation, which consists of an usual teleportation of an arbitrary single-qubit state, nonsymmetric basis measurement, and corresponding local transformation. It is shown that the teleportation of the quantum operation can be implemented with unit successful probability.

We demonstrate two entanglement concentration protocols (ECPs) for photon pairs in less-hyperentanglement, the simultaneous entanglement in multiple degrees of freedom. Using these ECPs, some maximally entangled states in polarization can be reconstructed deterministically from less-hyperentangled ones shared between remote participants. Both of the success probabilities are 100% in principle, and they do not require additional single photons. The former is implemented with the passive linear optics, which is achievable with current technology. The later adopts the cross-Kerr nonlinearity media to complete this task, which can increase the efficiency of the entanglement concentration process since it does not require the sophisticated single-photon detectors for measurements. The two ECPs are useful for practical long-distance quantum communication due to the fact that the entangled state in either the spatial degree of freedom or the frequency degree of freedom suffers little from channel noise in optical fiber.

Zhou et al. proposed a quantum encryption scheme based on quantum computation in 2006 [N. Zhou et al., Physica A362 (2006) 305]. Each qubit of the ciphertext is constrained to two pairs of conjugate states. So, its implementation is feasible with the existing technology. But it is inefficient since it entails six key bits to encrypt one message bit, and the resulting ciphertext for one message bit consists of three qubits. In addition, its security cannot be directly reduced to the well-known BB84 protocol. In this paper, we improve it using the technique developed in BB84 protocol. The new scheme entails only two key bits to encrypt one message bit. The resulting ciphertext is just composed of two qubits. It saves about a half cost without the loss of security. Moreover, the new scheme is probabilistic instead of deterministic.

We investigate the eigenenergies and the eigenfunctions of the ground and the first excited states of an electron, which is strongly coupled to LO-phonon in an asymmetric quantum dot (QD) by using variational method of Pekar type. The present system may be used as a two-level qubit. When the electron is in the superposition state of the ground and the first excited states, the probability density of the electron oscillates in the QD with a certain period. It is found that the oscillation period is an increasing function of the transverse and the longitudinal effective confinement lengths of the QD, whereas it is a decreasing one of the electron–phonon coupling strength.