Carlos Abellán, Antonio Acín, A. Alarcón, O. Alibart, C. K. Andersen, F. Andreoli, A. Beckert, Federica Beduini, Ariel Bendersky, M. Bentivegna, P. Bierhorst, D. Burchardt, Adán Cabello, J. Cariñe, Sílvia Carrasco, G. Carvacho, Daniel Cavalcanti, Rafael Chaves, J. Cortés-Vega, A. Cuevas, A. Delgado, Hugues de Riedmatten, C. Eichler, Pau Farrera, J. Fuenzalida, Marta García-Matos, R. Garthoff, S. Gasparinetti, T. Gerrits, F. Ghafari Jouneghani, S. Glancy, E. S. Gómez, P. González, J.-Y. Guan, J. Handsteiner, J. Heinsoo, Georg Heinze, Alina Hirschmann, Osvaldo Jiménez, F. Kaiser, E. Knill, L. T. Knoll, S. Krinner, P. Kurpiers, M. A. Larotonda, J.-Å. Larsson, A. Lenhard, H. Li, M.-H. Li, G. Lima, B. Liu, Y. Liu, I. H. López Grande, T. Lunghi, X. Ma, O. S. Magaña-Loaiza, P. Magnard, A. Magnoni, Maria Martí, D. Martínez, P. Mataloni, Alejandro Mattar, Margherita Mazzera, R. P. Mirin, Morgan W. Mitchell, S. Nam, M. Oppliger, J.-W. Pan, R. B. Patel, Valerio Pruneri, G. J. Pryde, D. Rauch, K. Redeker, Daniel Rieländer, M. Ringbauer, T. Roberson, W. Rosenfeld, Y. Salathé, L. Santodonato, G. Sauder, T. Scheidl, C. T. Schmiegelow, Fabio Sciarrino, A. Seri, L. K. Shalm, S.-C. Shi, S. Slussarenko, M. J. Stevens, S. Tanzilli, F. Toledo, Jordi Tura, R. Ursin, P. Vergyris, V. B. Verma, T. Walter, A. Wallraff, Z. Wang, Harald Weinfurter, M. M. Weston, A. G. White, C. Wu, G. B. Xavier, L. You, X. Yuan, Anton Zeilinger, Q. Zhang, W. Zhang and J. Zhong

A Bell test, which challenges the philosophical worldview of local realism against experimental observations, is a randomized trial requiring spatially-distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection, and unpredictable measurement settings. While technology can perfect the first two of these, and while technological randomness sources enable “device-independent” protocols based on Bell inequality violation, challenging local realism using physical randomizers inevitably makes assumptions about the same physics one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness of physical setting choices and argued that human “free will” could rigorously be used to assure unpredictability in Bell tests. Here we report a suite of local realism tests using human choices, avoiding such assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited ≈ 100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable bits while also illustrating Bell test methodology. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to twelve laboratories on five continents, in which 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles, and superconducting devices. Over a 12-hour period on the 30th of November 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained flow of over 1000 bits/s to the experiments, which used different human-generated bits to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realist positions in bi-partite and tripartite scenarios. Project outcomes include closing of the freedom-of-choice loophole, gamification of statistical and quantum non-locality concepts, new methods for quantum-secured communications, a very large dataset of human-generated randomness, and networking techniques for global participation in experimental science.

The ability to control multidimensional quantum systems is essential for studying fundamental science of complex quantum systems and for developing advanced quantum information processing technologies. Here we report a fully controllable multidimensional quantum technology with integrated optics, able to reliably generate, manipulate and analyze path-encoded bipartite multidimensional entangled-states with dimension up to 15 x 15. This is achieved by demonstrating a large-scale programmable silicon-photonics quantum circuit that integrates more than 550 optical components on a single chip, including 16 identical single-photon sources and near 100 optical phase controls. We verify the unprecedented precision and controllability of our approach, and explore it to demonstrate novel key quantum applications, such as quantum randomness expansion and self-testing on multidimensional states that were experimentally unexplored before. Our results lay the groundwork for the practical realization of multidimensional quantum information science and technologies.

Intensive studies of entanglement properties have proven essential for our understanding of quantum many-body systems. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum nonlocality in these systems because the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve correlations among many particles, which are difficult to access experimentally. We constructed multipartite Bell inequalities that involve only two-body correlations and show how they reveal the nonlocality in many-body systems relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. Our inequalities are violated by any number of parties and can be tested by measuring total spin components, opening the way to the experimental detection of many-body nonlocality, for instance with atomic ensembles.

We present a method to show that low-energy states of quantum many-body interacting systems in one spatial dimension are nonlocal. We assign a Bell inequality to the Hamiltonian of the system in a natural way and we efficiently find its classical bound using dynamic programing. The Bell inequality is such that its quantum value for a given state, and for appropriate observables, corresponds to the energy of the state. Thus, the presence of nonlocal correlations can be certified for states of low enough energy. The method can also be used to optimize certain Bell inequalities: in the translationally invariant (TI) case, we provide an exponentially faster computation of the classical bound and analytically closed expressions of the quantum value for appropriate observables and Hamiltonians. The power and generality of our method is illustrated through four representative examples: a tight TI inequality for eight parties, a quasi-TI uniparametric inequality for any even number of parties, ground states of spin-glass systems, and a nonintegrable interacting XXZ-like Hamiltonian. Our work opens the possibility for the use of low-energy states of commonly studied Hamiltonians as multipartite resources for quantum information protocols that require nonlocality.

Bell inequalities constitute a key tool in quantum information theory: they not only allow one to reveal nonlocality in composite quantum systems, but, more importantly, they can be used to certify relevant properties thereof. We provide a very simple and intuitive construction of Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by the multiqubit graph states and can be used for their robust self-testing. The main advantage of our inequalities over previous constructions for these states lies in the fact that the number of correlations they contain scales only linearly with the number of observers, which presents a significant reduction of the experimental effort needed to violate them. We also discuss possible generalizations of our approach by showing that it is applicable to entangled states whose stabilizers are not simply tensor products of Pauli matrices.

We consider the characterization of entanglement depth in a quantum many-body system from the device-independent perspective; i.e., certifying how many particles are genuinely entangled without relying on assumptions on the system itself nor on the measurements performed. We obtain device-independent witnesses of entanglement depth (DIWEDs) using the Bell inequalities introduced in J. Tura et al. [Science 344, 1256 (2014)] and compute their k-producibility bounds. To this end, we present two complementary methods: First, a variational one, yielding a possibly optimal k-producible state. Second, a certificate of optimality via a semi-definite program, based on a relaxation of the quantum marginal problem. Numerical results suggest a clear pattern on k-producible bounds for large system sizes, which we then tackle analytically in the thermodynamic limit. Contrary to existing DIWEDs, the ones we present here can be effectively measured by accessing only collective measurements and second moments thereof. These technical requirements are met in current experiments, which have already been performed in the context of detecting Bell correlations in quantum many-body systems of 5⋅10^2∼5⋅10^5 atoms.

We expand the toolbox for studying Bell correlations in multipartite systems by introducing permutationally invariant Bell inequalities (PIBIs) involving few-body correlators. First, we present around twenty families of PIBIs with up to three- or four-body correlators, that are valid for arbitrary number of particles. Compared to known inequalities, these show higher noise robustenss, or the capability to detect Bell correlations in highly non-Gaussian spin states. We then focus on finding PIBIs that are of practical experimental implementation, in the sense that the associated operators require collective spin measurements along only a few directions. To this end, we formulate this search problem as a semidefinite program that embeds the constraints required to look for PIBIs of the desired form.

We present a method to certify the presence of Bell correlations in experimentally observed statistics, and to obtain new Bell inequalities. Our approach is based on relaxing the conditions defining the set of correlations obeying a local hidden variable model, yielding a convergent hierarchy of semidefinite programs (SdP's). Because the size of these SdP's is independent of the number of parties involved, this technique allows to characterize correlations in many-body systems. As an example, we illustrate our method with the experimental data presented in [Science 352, 441 (2016)].

Bell inequalities have traditionally been used to demonstrate that quantum theory is nonlocal, in the sense that there exist correlations generated from composite quantum states that cannot be explained by means of local hidden variables. With the advent of device-independent quantum information protocols, Bell inequalities have gained an additional role as certificates of relevant quantum properties. In this work, we consider the problem of designing Bell inequalities that are tailored to detect maximally entangled states. We introduce a class of Bell inequalities valid for an arbitrary number of measurements and results, derive analytically their tight classical, nonsignaling, and quantum bounds and prove that the latter is attained by maximally entangled states. Our inequalities can therefore find an application in device-independent protocols requiring maximally entangled states.

Understanding the relation between nonlocality and entanglement is one of the fundamental problems in quantum physics. In the bipartite case, it is known that the correlations observed for some entangled quantum states can be explained within the framework of local models, thus proving that these resources are inequivalent in this scenario. However, except for a single example of an entangled three-qubit state that has a local model, almost nothing is known about such relation in multipartite systems. We provide a general construction of genuinely multipartite entangled states that do not display genuinely multipartite nonlocality, thus proving that entanglement and nonlocality are inequivalent for any number of particles.

Preparing the ground state of a Hamiltonian is a problem of great significance in physics with deep implications in the field of combinatorial optimization. The adiabatic algorithm is known to return the ground state for sufficiently long preparation times which depend on the a priori unknown spectral gap. Our work relates in a twofold way. First, we propose a method to obtain information about the spectral profile of the adiabatic evolution. Second, we present the concept of a variational quantum adiabatic algorithm (VQAA) for optimized adiabatic paths. We aim at combining the strengths of the adiabatic and the variational approaches for fast and high-fidelity ground state preparation while keeping the number of measurements as low as possible. Our algorithms build upon ancilla protocols which we present that allow to directly evaluate the ground state overlap. We benchmark for a non-integrable spin-1/2 transverse and longitudinal Ising chain with N=53 sites using tensor network techniques. Using a black box, gradient-based approach, we report a reduction in the total evolution time for a given desired ground state overlap by a factor of ten, which makes our method suitable for the limited decoherence time of noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices.

Entanglement in symmetric quantum states and the theory of copositive matrices are intimately related concepts. For the simplest symmetric states, i.e., the diagonal symmetric (DS) states, it has been shown that there exists a correspondence between exceptional (non-exceptional) copositive matrices and non-decomposable (decomposable) Entanglement Witnesses (EWs). Here we show that EWs of symmetric, but not DS, states can also be constructed from extended copositive matrices, providing new examples of bound entangled symmetric states, together with their corresponding EWs, in arbitrary odd dimensions.

Given a Bell inequality, if its maximal quantum violation can be achieved only by a single set of measurements for each party or a single quantum state, up to local unitaries, one refers to such a phenomenon as "self-testing". For instance, the maximal quantum violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality certifies that the underlying state contains the two-qubit maximally entangled state and the measurements of one party (say, Alice) contains a pair of anti-commuting qubit observables. As a consequence, the other party (say, Bob) automatically verifies his set of states remotely steered by Alice, namely the "assemblage", is in the eigenstates of a pair of anti-commuting observables. It is natural to ask if the quantum violation of the Bell inequality is not maximally achieved, are we capable of estimating how close the underlying assemblage is to the reference one? In this work, we provide a systematic device-independent estimation by proposing a framework called "robust self-testing of steerable quantum assemblages". In particular, we consider assemblages violating several paradigmatic Bell inequalities and obtain the robust self-testing statement for each scenario. Our result is device-independent (DI), i.e., no assumption is made on the shared state and the measurement devices involved. Our work thus not only paves a way for exploring the connection between the boundary of quantum set of correlations and steerable assemblages, but also provides a useful tool in the areas of DI quantum certification. As two explicit applications, we show 1) that it can be used for an alternative proof of the protocol of DI certification of all entangled states proposed by Bowles et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 180503 (2018)], and 2) that it can be used to verify all non-entanglement-breaking channels with fewer assumptions compared with the work of Rosset et al. [Phys. Rev. X 8, 021033 (2018)].

Transitions out of the ground space limit the performance of quantum adiabatic algorithms, while hardware imperfections impose stringent limitations on the circuit depth. We propose an adiabatic echo verification protocol which mitigates both coherent and incoherent errors, arising from non-adiabatic transitions and hardware noise, respectively. Quasi-adiabatically evolving forward and backward allows for an echo-verified measurement of any observable. In addition to mitigating hardware noise, our method uses positive-time dynamics only. Crucially, the estimator bias of the observable is reduced when compared to standard adiabatic preparation, achieving up to a quadratic improvement.

Bell inequalities are an important tool in device-independent quantum information processing because their violation can serve as a certificate of relevant quantum properties. Probably the best known example of a Bell inequality is due to Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt (CHSH), defined in the simplest scenario involving two dichotomic measurements, whose all key properties are well understood. While there have been many attempts to generalise it to higher-dimensional quantum systems, quite surprisingly, most of them turn out to be difficult to analyse. In particular, the maximal quantum violation---a key quantity for most device-independent applications---remains unknown except for the simplest cases. Here we propose a new generalisation of the CHSH Bell inequality which preserves several of its attractive features: the maximal quantum value can be computed analytically and can be achieved by the maximally entangled states and mutually unbiased bases. These inequalities involve d measurements settings, each having d outcomes for an arbitrary prime number d≥3. We then show that in the three-outcome case our Bell inequality is a self-test: it can be used to self-test the maximally entangled state of two-qutrits and three mutually unbiased bases at each site. Yet, we demonstrate that in the case of more outcomes, their maximal violation does not allow for self-testing in the standard sense, which suggests a new weak form of self-testing. The ability to certify high-dimensional MUBs makes them attractive from the device-independent cryptography point of view.

We show that spin systems with infinite-range interactions can violate at thermal equilibrium a multipartite Bell inequality, up to a finite critical temperature T_c. Our framework can be applied to a wide class of spin systems and Bell inequalities, to study whether nonlocality occurs naturally in quantum many-body systems close to the ground state. Moreover, we also show that the low-energy spectrum of the Bell operator associated to such systems can be well approximated by the one of a quantum harmonic oscillator, and that spin-squeezed states are optimal in displaying Bell correlations for such Bell inequalities.

We study the separability problem in mixtures of Dicke states i.e., the separability of the so-called Diagonal Symmetric (DS) states. First, we show that separability in the case of DS in Cd⊗Cd (symmetric qudits) can be reformulated as a quadratic conic optimization problem. This connection allows us to exchange concepts and ideas between quantum information and this field of mathematics. For instance, copositive matrices can be understood as indecomposable entanglement witnesses for DS states. As a consequence, we show that positivity of the partial transposition (PPT) is sufficient and necessary for separability of DS states for d≤4. Furthermore, for d≥5, we provide analytic examples of PPT-entangled states. Second, we develop new sufficient separability conditions beyond the PPT criterion for bipartite DS states. Finally, we focus on N-partite DS qubits, where PPT is known to be necessary and sufficient for separability. In this case, we present a family of almost DS states that are PPT with respect to each partition but nevertheless entangled..

Computationally intractable tasks are often encountered in physics and optimization. Such tasks often comprise a cost function to be optimized over a so-called feasible set, which is specified by a set of constraints. This may yield, in general, to difficult and non-convex optimization tasks. A number of standard methods are used to tackle such problems: variational approaches focus on parameterizing a subclass of solutions within the feasible set; in contrast, relaxation techniques have been proposed to approximate it from outside, thus complementing the variational approach by providing ultimate bounds to the global optimal solution. In this work, we propose a novel approach combining the power of relaxation techniques with deep reinforcement learning in order to find the best possible bounds within a limited computational budget. We illustrate the viability of the method in the context of finding the ground state energy of many-body quantum systems, a paradigmatic problem in quantum physics. We benchmark our approach against other classical optimization algorithms such as breadth-first search or Monte-Carlo, and we characterize the effect of transfer learning. We find the latter may be indicative of phase transitions, with a completely autonomous approach. Finally, we provide tools to generalize the approach to other common applications in the field of quantum information processing.

In device-independent quantum information processing Bell inequalities are not only used as detectors of nonlocality, but also as certificates of relevant quantum properties. In order for these certificates to work, one very often needs Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by specific quantum states. Recently, in [A. Salavrakos et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 040402 (2017)] a general class of Bell inequalities, with arbitrary numbers of measurements and outcomes, has been designed, which are maximally violated by the maximally entangled states of two quantum systems of arbitrary dimension. In this work, we generalize these results to the multipartite scenario and obtain a general class of Bell inequalities maximally violated by the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states of any number of parties and any local dimension. We then derive analytically their maximal quantum and nonsignaling values. We also obtain analytically the bound for detecting genuine nonlocality and compute the fully local bound for a few exemplary cases. Moreover, we consider the question of adapting this class of inequalities to partially entangled GHZ-like states for some special cases of low dimension and small number of parties. Through numerical methods, we find classes of inequalities maximally violated by these partially entangled states.

In this paper, we present a method to solve the quantum marginal problem for symmetric d-level systems. The method is built upon an efficient semi-definite program that determines the compatibility conditions of an m-body reduced density with a global n-body density matrix supported on the symmetric space. We illustrate the applicability of the method in central quantum information problems with several exemplary case studies. Namely, (i) a fast variational ansatz to optimize local Hamiltonians over symmetric states, (ii) a method to optimize symmetric, few-body Bell operators over symmetric states and (iii) a set of sufficient conditions to determine which symmetric states cannot be self-tested from few-body observables. As a by-product of our findings, we also provide a generic, analytical correspondence between arbitrary superpositions of n-qubit Dicke states and translationally-invariant diagonal matrix product states of bond dimension n.

We consider a family of tensor network states defined on regular lattices that can be efficiently prepared with a quantum computer by adiabatic evolution. This family comprises relevant classes of states, such as injective Matrix Product and Projected Entangled-Pair States, and some corresponding to classical spin models. We show how uniform lower bounds to the gap of the parent Hamiltonian along the adiabatic trajectory can be efficiently computed using semi-definite programming. We also derive a set of observables whose expectation values can be easily determined and that form a complete set, in the sense that they uniquely characterize the state. We identify a subset of those observables which can be efficiently computed if one has access to the quantum state and local measurements, and analyze how they can be used in verification procedures.

Contemporary understanding of correlations in quantum many-body systems and in quantum phase transitions is based to a large extent on the recent intensive studies of entanglement in many-body systems. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum nonlocality in these systems, mostly because the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve high-order correlations among many particles, which are hard to access theoretically, and even harder experimentally. Standard, "theorist- and experimentalist-friendly" many-body observables involve correlations among only few (one, two, rarely three...) particles. Typically, there is no multipartite Bell inequality for this scenario based on such low-order correlations. Recently, however, we have succeeded in constructing multipartite Bell inequalities that involve two- and one-body correlations only, and showed how they revealed the nonlocality in many-body systems relevant for nuclear and atomic physics [Science 344, 1256 (2014)]. With the present contribution we continue our work on this problem. On the one hand, we present a detailed derivation of the above Bell inequalities, pertaining to permutation symmetry among the involved parties. On the other hand, we present a couple of new results concerning such Bell inequalities. First, we characterize their tightness. We then discuss maximal quantum violations of these inequalities in the general case, and their scaling with the number of parties. Moreover, we provide new classes of two-body Bell inequalities which reveal nonlocality of the Dicke states---ground states of physically relevant and experimentally realizable Hamiltonians. Finally, we shortly discuss various scenarios for nonlocality detection in mesoscopic systems of trapped ions or atoms, and by atoms trapped in the vicinity of designed nanostructures.

From both theoretical and experimental points of view symmetric states constitute an important class of multipartite states. Still, entanglement properties of these states, in particular those with positive partial transposition (PPT), lack a systematic study. Aiming at filling in this gap, we have recently affirmatively answered the open question of existence of four-qubit entangled symmetric states with PPT and thoroughly characterized entanglement properties of such states [Phys. Rev. A 85, 060302(R) (2012)]. With the present contribution we continue on characterizing PPT entangled symmetric states. On the one hand, we present all the results of our previous work in a detailed way. On the other hand, we generalize them to systems consisting of an arbitrary number of qubits. In particular, we provide criteria for separability of such states formulated in terms of their ranks. Interestingly, for most of the cases, the symmetric states are either separable or typically separable. Then, edge states in these systems are studied, showing in particular that to characterize generic PPT entangled states with four and five qubits, it is enough to study only those that assume few (respectively, two and three) specific configurations of ranks. Finally, we numerically search for extremal PPT entangled states in such systems consisting of up to 23 qubits. One can clearly notice regularity behind the ranks of such extremal states, and, in particular, for systems composed of odd numbers of qubits we find a single configuration of ranks for which there are extremal states.

We solve the open question of the existence of four-qubit entangled symmetric states with positive partial transpositions (PPT states). We reach this goal with two different approaches. First, we propose a half-analytical–half-numerical method that allows us to construct multipartite PPT entangled symmetric states (PPTESSs) from the qubit-qudit PPT entangled states. Second, we adapt the algorithm allowing us to search for extremal elements in the convex set of bipartite PPT states [Phys. Rev. A 76, 034304 (2007)] to the multipartite scenario. With its aid we search for extremal four-qubit PPTESSs and show that generically they have ranks (5,7,8). Finally, we provide an exhaustive characterization of these states with respect to their separability properties.

Physical principles constrain the way nonlocal correlations can be distributed among parties in a Bell experiment. Here, we show that in any no-signalling theory the amount of violation of a certain class of Bell inequalities tightly bounds the knowledge that an external observer can gain about outcomes of any single measurement performed by the parties. Analogous relations are then proved for quantum correlations in the simplest scenario of three parties performing two dichotomic measurements. Later, we relate these monogamy trade-offs to the generation and amplification of randomness, in the latter case, in particular, reproducing and generalizing the results of [R. Colbeck and R. Renner, Nature Phys. 8, 450 (2012)]. Finally, we show that with the aid of the chained Bell inequalities one can amplify the epsilon-sources for epsilon < 1/6, improving the existing results.

Building upon the results of [R. Augusiak et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 030404 (2015)] we develop a general approach to the generation of genuinely entangled multipartite states of any number of parties from genuinely entangled states of a fixed number of parties, in particular, the bipartite entangled ones. In our approach, certain isometries whose output subspaces are either symmetric or genuinely entangled in some multipartite Hilbert spaces are applied to local subsystems of bipartite entangled or multipartite genuinely entangled quantum states. To prove that entanglement of the resulting states is indeed genuine we then introduce novel criteria allowing to decide it efficiently. The construction is then exploited to provide examples of multipartite states that are genuinely entangled but not genuinely nonlocal, giving further illustration for the inequivalence between entanglement and nonlocality in the multiparticle scenario. It is also shown how to construct genuinely entangled states which are unsteerable across certain bipartite cuts.

In a recent work [A. Aloy et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 100507 (2019)] we have considered the characterization of entanglement depth, from a device-independent perspective, in a quantum many-body system. We have shown that the inequalities introduced by J. Tura et al. [Science 344, 1256 (2014)] can be used to obtain device-independent witnesses of entanglement depth (DIWEDs) and that they enjoy two key properties that allow one to compute their k-producibility bounds more efficiently for larger system sizes, as well as yielding experimentally friendlier device-independent witnesses of entanglement depth: they involve at most two-body correlators and they are permutationally invariant. While the main aim of our previous work was to illustrate the main ideas and applicability of the method, here we outline the details and complement its findings with detailed analysis and further case studies. Specifically, we consider the problem of finding the k-producible bounds of such DIWEDs under different assumptions. Not surprisingly, with the weakest assumptions, we can compute k-producible bounds only for a relatively small number of parties; however, we can still learn interesting features from these solutions that motivate the search on larger systems under the assumption that these features persist. This allows us to tackle the case where the system size eventually reaches the thermodynamic limit.

While the interest in multipartite nonlocality has grown in recent years, its existence in large quantum systems is difficult to confirm experimentally. This is mostly due to the inadequacy of standard multipartite Bell inequalities to many-body systems: such inequalities usually rely on expectation values involving many parties and require an individual addressing of each party. In a recent work [J. Tura et al. Science 344, 6189 (2014)] some of us proposed simpler Bell inequalities overcoming such difficulties, opening the way for the detection of Bell correlations with trusted collective measurements through Bell correlation witnesses [R. Schmied et al. Science 352, 441 (2016)], hence demonstrating the presence of Bell correlations with assumptions on the statistics. Here, we address the question of assessing the number of particles sharing genuinely nonlocal correlations in a multipartite system. This endeavour is a priori challenging, as known Bell inequalities for genuine nonlocality suffer from the above shortcomings, plus a number of measurement settings scaling exponentially with the system size. We first show that most of these constraints drop once the witnesses corresponding to these inequalities are expressed: in systems where multipartite expectation values can be evaluated, these witnesses can reveal genuine nonlocality for an arbitrary number of particles with just two collective measurements. We then introduce a general framework focused on two-body Bell-like inequalities. We show that they also provide information about the number of particles that are genuinely nonlocal. Then, we characterize all such inequalities for a finite system size. We provide witnesses of Bell correlation depth k≤6 for any number of parties, within experimental reach. A violation for depth 6 is achieved with existing data from an ensemble of 480 atoms.

State-of-the-art quantum computers can only reliably execute circuits with limited qubit numbers and computational depth. This severely reduces the scope of algorithms that can be run. While numerous techniques have been invented to exploit few-qubit devices, corresponding schemes for depth-limited computations are less explored. This work investigates to what extent we can mimic the performance of a deeper quantum computation by repeatedly using a shallower device. We propose a method for this purpose, inspired by Feynman simulation, where a given circuit is chopped into two pieces. The first piece is executed and measured early on, and the second piece is run based on the previous outcome. This method is inefficient if applied in a straightforward manner due to the high number of possible outcomes. To mitigate this issue, we propose a shallow variational circuit, whose purpose is to maintain the complexity of the method within predefined tolerable limits, and provide an optimization method to find such a circuit. The composition of these components of the methods is called “reduce&chop.” As we discuss, this approach works for certain cases of interest. We believe this work may stimulate new research towards exploiting the potential of shallow quantum computers.

We formulate an algorithm to lower bound the fidelity between quantum many-body states only from partial information, such as the one accessible by few-body observables. Our method is especially tailored to permutationally invariant states, but it gives nontrivial results in all situations where this symmetry is even partial. This property makes it particularly useful for experiments with atomic ensembles, where relevant many-body states can be certified from collective measurements. As an example, we show that a ξ^2≈−6dB spin squeezed state of N=100 particles can be certified with a fidelity up to F=0.999, only from the measurement of its polarization and of its squeezed quadrature. Moreover, we show how to quantitatively account for both measurement noise and partial symmetry in the states, which makes our method useful in realistic experimental situations.

Passive states are defined as those states that do not allow for work extraction in a cyclic (unitary) process. Within the set of passive states, thermal states are the most stable ones: they maximize the entropy for a given energy, and similarly they minimize the energy for a given entropy. In this article we find the passive states lying in the other extreme, i.e., those that maximize the energy for a given entropy, which we show also minimize the entropy when the energy is fixed. These extremal properties make these states useful to obtain fundamental bounds for the thermodynamics of finite dimensional quantum systems, which we show in several scenarios.

Bell inequalities are natural tools that allow one to certify the presence of nonlocality in quantum systems. The known constructions of multipartite Bell inequalities contain, however, correlation functions involving all observers, making their experimental implementation difficult. The main purpose of this work is to explore the possibility of witnessing nonlocality in multipartite quantum states from the easiest-to-measure quantities, that is, the two-body correlations. In particular, we determine all three- and four-partite Bell inequalities constructed from one- and two-body expectation values that obey translational symmetry, and show that they reveal nonlocality in multipartite states. Also, by providing a particular example of a five-partite Bell inequality, we show that nonlocality can be detected from two-body correlators involving only nearest neighbours. Finally, we demonstrate that any translationally invariant Bell inequality can be maximally violated by a translationally invariant state and the same set of observables at all sites. We provide a numerical algorithm allowing one to seek for maximal violation of a translationally invariant Bell inequality.
This article is part of a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical devoted to 50 years of Bell's theorem.

In 2008, the conjecture that structural physical approximations (SPAs) to optimal entanglement witnesses are separable states (in general unnormalized) was posed. In an attempt to disprove it, Ha and Kye (2012 arXiv:1210.1088v3) proposed a decomposable entanglement witness, whose SPA is entangled, and argued that it is optimal. In this paper, which is based on a comment to the latter work (Augusiak et al 2013 arXiv:1304.2040v1), we show, both analytically and numerically, that this entanglement witness is not optimal, and as such it is not a counterexample to the conjecture. To this end, we make use of a method for checking the optimality of entanglement witnesses developed already in Lewenstein et al (2000 Phys. Rev. A 62 052310), however, hardly exploited so far in the literature.

Entanglement witnesses (EWs) constitute one of the most important entanglement detectors in quantum systems. Nevertheless, their complete characterization, in particular with respect to the notion of optimality, is still missing, even in the decomposable case. Here we show that for any qubit-qunit decomposable EW (DEW) W the three statements are equivalent: (i) the set of product vectors obeying \bra{e,f}W\ket{e,f}=0 spans the corresponding Hilbert space, (ii) W is optimal, (iii) W=Q^{\Gamma} with Q denoting a positive operator supported on a completely entangled subspace (CES) and \Gamma standing for the partial transposition. While, implications (i)⇒(ii) and (ii)⇒(iii) are known, here we prove that (iii) implies (i). This is a consequence of a more general fact saying that product vectors orthogonal to any CES in C^{2}\otimes C^{n} span after partial conjugation the whole space. On the other hand, already in the case of C^{3}\otimes C^{3} Hilbert space, there exist DEWs for which (iii) does not imply (i). Consequently, either (i) does not imply (ii), or (ii) does not imply (iii), and the above transparent characterization obeyed by qubit-qunit DEWs, does not hold in general.

Quantum nonlocality is associated with the local indistinguishability of orthogonal states. Unextendible product basis (UPB), a widely used tool in quantum information, exhibits nonlocality, which is the powerful resource for quantum information processing. In this work, we extend the definitions of nonlocality and genuine nonlocality from states to operators. We also extend UPB to the notions of unextendible product operator basis, unextendible product unitary operator basis (UPUOB), and strongly UPUOB. We construct their examples and show the nonlocality of some strongly UPUOBs under local operations and classical communications. We study the phenomenon of these operators acting on quantum states. As an application, we distinguish the two-dimensional strongly UPUOB, which only consumes three ebits of entanglement. Our results imply that such UPUOBs exhibit nonlocality as UPBs, and the distinguishability of them requires entanglement resources.

We propose a general-purpose quantum algorithm for preparing ground states of quantum Hamiltonians from a given trial state. The algorithm is based on techniques recently developed in the context of solving the quantum linear systems problem [Childs, Kothari, Somma'15]. We show that, compared to algorithms based on phase estimation, the runtime of our algorithm is exponentially better as a function of the allowed error, and at least quadratically better as a function of the overlap with the trial state. We also show that our algorithm requires fewer ancilla qubits than existing algorithms, making it attractive for early applications of small quantum computers. Additionally, it can be used to determine an unknown ground energy faster than with phase estimation if a very high precision is required.

Physical transformations are described by linear maps that are completely positive and trace preserving (CPTP). However, maps that are positive (P) but not completely positive (CP) are instrumental to derive separability/entanglement criteria. Moreover, the properties of such maps can be linked to entanglement properties of the states they detect. Here, we extend the results presented in [Phys. Rev A {\bf 93}, 042335 (2016)], where sufficient separability criteria for bipartite systems were derived. In particular, we analyze the entanglement depth of an $N$-qubit system by proposing linear maps that, when applied to any state, result in a bi-separable state for the $1:(N-1)$ partitions, i.e., $(N-1)$-entanglement depth. Furthermore, we derive criteria to detect arbitrary $(N-n)$-entanglement depth tailored to states in close vicinity of the completely depolarized state (the normalized identity matrix). We also provide separability (or $1$- entanglement depth) conditions in the symmetric sector, including for diagonal states. Finally, we suggest how similar map techniques can be used to derive sufficient conditions for a set of expectation values to be compatible with separable states or local-hidden-variable theories. We dedicate this paper to the memory of the late Andrzej Kossakowski, our spiritual and intellectual mentor in the field of linear maps.

Here we discuss quantum algorithms for the so-called k-local Hamiltonian prob-lem. This is one of the problems that is QMA-complete which, roughly speaking, is the NP-complete analogue for a quantum computer. We discuss exact methods, both classical and quantum, as well as approximate algorithms, more tailored to existing NISQ (noisy, intermediate-scale quantum) devices. We present a roadmap towards building an algorithmic cooling procedure in a NISQ device and we conclude observing some of the challenges that quantum software engi-neering might encounter in the future.

Current understanding of correlations and quantum phase transitions in many-body systems has significantly improved thanks to the recent intensive studies of their entanglement properties. In contrast, much less is known about the role of quantum non-locality in these systems. On the one hand, standard, "theorist- and experimentalist-friendly" many-body observables involve correlations among only few (one, two, rarely three...) particles. On the other hand, most of the available multipartite Bell inequalities involve correlations among many particles. Such correlations are notoriously hard to access theoretically, and even harder experimentally. Typically, there is no Bell inequality for many-body systems built only from low-order correlation functions. Recently, however, it has been shown in [J. Tura et al., Science 344, 1256 (2014)] that multipartite Bell inequalities constructed only from two-body correlation functions are strong enough to reveal non-locality in some many-body states, in particular those relevant for nuclear and atomic physics. The purpose of this lecture is to provide an overview of the problem of quantum correlations in many-body systems - from entanglement to nonlocality - and the methods for their characterization.

The phase shift rules enable the estimation of the derivative of a quantum state with respect to phase parameters, providing valuable insights into the behavior and dynamics of quantum systems. This capability is essential in quantum simulation tasks where understanding the behavior of complex quantum systems is of interest, such as simulating chemical reactions or condensed matter systems. However, parameter shift rules are typically designed for Hamiltonian systems with equidistant eigenvalues. For systems with closely spaced eigenvalues, effective rules have not been established. We provide insights about the optimal design of a parameter shift rule, tailored to various sorts of spectral information that may be available. The proposed method lets derivatives be calculated for any system, regardless of how close the eigenvalues are to each other. It also optimizes the number of phase shifts, which reduces the amount of gate resources needed.

News and Views on Efficient parallelization of tensor network contraction for simulating quantum computation, Nat. Comput. Sci. (2021) by C. Huang et al.

Viewpoint on What Limits the Simulation of Quantum Computers?, Phys. Rev. X 10, 041038 (2020) by Yiqing Zhou, E. Milies Stoudenmire and X. Waintal.

Thesis Committee: Prof. Dr. Nicolas Gisin (President), Prof. Dr. Ignacio Cirac (Member), Prof. Dr. Darrick Chang (Secretary), Prof. Dr. Andreas Winter (Substitute Member) and Prof. Dr. Hugues de Riedmatten (Substitute Member).

2015/7/20

Entanglement and nonlocal correlations constitute two fundamental resources for quantum information processing, as they allow for novel tasks that are otherwise impossible in a classical scenario. However, their elusive characterization is still a central problem in Quantum Information Theory. The main reason why such a fundamental issue remains a formidable challenge lies in the exponential growth in complexity of the Hilbert space, as well as the space of nonlocal correlations. Physical systems of interest, on the other hand, display symmetries that can be exploited to reduce this complexity, opening the possibility that, for such systems, some of these questions become tractable. This PhD Thesis is dedicated to the study and characterization of entanglement and nonlocal correlations constrained under symmetries. It contains original results in these four threads of research: PPT entanglement in the symmetric states, nonlocality detection in many-body systems, the non-equivalence between entanglement and nonlocality and elemental monogamies of correlations. First, we study PPT entanglement in fully symmetric n-qubit states. We solve the open question on the existence of four-qubit PPT entangled states of these kind, providing constructive examples and methods. Furthermore, we develop criteria for separability, edgeness and the Schmidt number of PPT entangled symmetric states. Geometrically, we focus on the characterization of extremal states of this family and we provide an algorithm to find states with such properties. Second, we study nonlocality in many-body systems. We consider permutationally and translationally invariant Bell inequalities consisting of two-body correlators. These constitute the first tools to detect nonlocality in many-body systems in an experimentally friendly way with our current technology. Furthermore, we show how these Bell inequalities detect nonlocality in physically relevant systems such as ground states of Hamiltonians that naturally arise e.g., in nuclear physics. We provide analytical classes of Bell inequalities and we analytically characterize which states and measurements are best suited for them. We show that the method we introduce can be fully generalized to correlators of any order in any Bell scenario. Finally, we provide some feedback from a more experimental point of view. Third, we demonstrate that entanglement and nonlocality are inequivalent concepts in general; a question that remained open in the multipartite case. We show that the strongest form of entanglement, genuinely multipartite entanglement, does not imply the strongest form of nonlocality, genuinely multipartite nonlocality, in any case. We give a constructive method that, starting from a multipartite genuinely multipartite state admitting a K-local model, extends it to a genuinely multipartite entangled state of any number of parties while preserving the degree of locality. Finally, we show that nonlocal correlations are monogamous in a much stronger sense than the typical one, in which the figure of merit compares a Bell inequality violation between two sets of parties. We show that the amount of Bell violation that a set of parties observes limits the knowledge that any external observer may gain on any of the outcomes of any of the parties performing the Bell experiment. We show that this holds even if such observer is not limited by quantum physics, but it only obeys the no-signalling principle. Apart from its fundamental interest, we show how these stronger monogamy relations boost the performance of some device-independent (DI) protocols such as DI quantum key distribution or DI randomness amplification.

Master Thesis Committee: Prof. Dr. Jordi Quer (President), Prof. Dr. Sebastià Xambó (Secretary) and Dr. Juanjo Rué (Member).

2011/6/30

2011/7/27

Since its genesis, quantum mechanics has proved to be a very accurate model for predicting the behavior of the world below the nanoscale. However, crucial breakthroughs in technology were needed in order to be able to effectively access and manipulate such small magnitudes. During the last twenty years, the field of quantum information processing has experienced a growing interest, in its many variants, both theoretically and practically. Despite being still at a very basic stage, expectations are high. The uniqueness of quantum phenomena (superposition of states, creation of entanglement, etc.) have no classical analogue and allow novelties such as another paradigm of computation, more secure communications, quantum teleportation, quantum dense coding, etc. which are presented and analyzed here. The aim of this Thesis is to present in a unified way the main mathematical methods used in quantum information processing, as well as the state of the art of their corresponding technological implementations. Our contributions are based in making a self-contained presentation; seeking completeness, that is, treating the most relevant fields of research involved, focusing on their relations; and picking the most relevant, insightful references, given the quantity of literature produced in this field. We also discuss some of the fundamental questions that remain still unanswered, and which are the current lines of research to shed light onto them.