International Journal of Quantum Information

Complementarity is one of the central mysteries of quantum mechanics, dramatically illustrated by the wave-particle duality in Young's double-slit experiment, and famously regarded by Feynman as "impossible, absolutely impossible to describe classically, [and] which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics" (emphasis original).¹ The overarching goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that complementarity is also at the heart of quantum information theory, that it allows us to make (some) sense of just what information "quantum information" refers to, and that it is useful in understanding and constructing quantum information processing protocols.

We analyze discrete-time quantum walks on Sierpinski gaskets using a flip-flop shift operator with the Grover coin. We obtain the scaling of two important physical quantities: The mean-square displacement, and the mixing time as function of the number of points. The Sierpinski gasket is a fractal that lacks translational invariance and the results differ from those described in the literature for ordinary lattices. We find that the diffusion scaling depends on the initial location. Averaged over all initial locations, our simulation obtain an exponent very similar to the classical diffusion.

The characterization of quantum discord (QD) has been well understood only for two-qubit states and is little known for mixed states beyond qubits. In this work, thermal quantum discord is studied for a qutrit system in different magnetic fields, where classical correlation and entanglement negativity are calculated for comparison. It is shown that the discord is more robust against temperature than the negativity. For a suitable region of magnetic field and its direction, the discord is non-zero while the negativity is zero. When the system is at a lower temperature, these three quantities, however, display a similar behavior for the varied field and direction, and their discontinuities come from crossovers between different ground states in the system. Moreover, the inequality between the quantum and classical correlations depends upon the system parameters as well as the temperature. In particular, both correlations are equal at a suitable field, direction, and temperature. Remarkably, such an equality remains for a strong field in the antiparallel direction, while both correlations in two-qubit systems are identical for any antiparallel field and temperature. These are useful for quantum information and understanding quantum correlations in qutrit mixed states.

The continuous-variable (CV) entanglement of the output fields is investigated in a four-level correlated emission laser system. The atomic coherence is introduced using two external classical driving fields. Based on the input–output theory, it is shown that the output entanglement and the entangled photons of the system can be achievable under certain conditions. Moreover, it is found that the two-mode entanglement has a close relation with the intensities of two external driving fields.

Majorana representation (MR) of symmetric N-qubit pure states has been used successfully in entanglement classification. Generalization of this has been a long standing open problem due to the difficulties faced in the construction of a Majorana like geometric representation for symmetric mixed state. We have overcome this problem by developing a method of classifying local unitary (LU) equivalent classes of symmetric N-qubit mixed states based on the geometrical multiaxial representation (MAR) of the density matrix. In addition to the two parameters defined for the entanglement classification of the symmetric pure states based on MR, namely, diversity degree and degeneracy configuration, we show that another parameter called rank needs to be introduced for symmetric mixed state classification. Our scheme of classification is more general as it can be applied to both pure and mixed states. To bring out the similarities/differences between the MR and MAR, N-qubit GHZ state is taken up for a detailed study. We conclude that pure state classification based on MR is not a special case of our classification scheme based on MAR. We also give a recipe to identify the most general symmetric N-qubit pure separable states. The power of our method is demonstrated using several well-known examples of symmetric two-qubit pure and mixed states as well as three-qubit pure states. Classification of uniaxial, biaxial and triaxial symmetric two-qubit mixed states which can be produced in the laboratory is studied in detail.