Engineering topics

Wilde, Mark M

Publications and source records attributed to Wilde, Mark M.

5 records

DOE OSTI2011

Comment on ''Secret-key-assisted private classical communication capacity over quantum channels''

The paper of Hsieh, Luo, and Brun (HLB) [Phys. Rev. A 78, 042306 (2008)] contains several issues with the capacity theorem presented there, one of which is the suggestion that a sender and receiver can achieve entanglement-assisted classical capacity without any entanglement at all, and another of which is a violation of the Holevo bound. There is also an issue with the converse proof of the capacity theorem. In this comment, I point out these issues and provide revisions of the capacity theorem and the converse proof.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2010

Identifying the quantum correlations in light-harvesting complexes

One of the major efforts in the quantum biological program is to subject biological systems to standard tests or measures of quantumness. These tests and measures should elucidate whether nontrivial quantum effects may be present in biological systems. Two such measures of quantum correlations are the quantum discord and the relative entropy of entanglement. Here, we show that the relative entropy of entanglement admits a simple analytic form when dynamics and accessible degrees of freedom are restricted to a zero- and single-excitation subspace. We also simulate and calculate the amount of quantum discord that is present in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson protein complex during the transfer of an excitation from a chlorosome antenna to a reaction center. We find that the single-excitation quantum discord and single-excitation relative entropy of entanglement are equal for all of our numerical simulations, but a proof of their general equality for this setting evades us for now. Also, some of our simulations demonstrate that the relative entropy of entanglement without the single-excitation restriction is much lower than the quantum discord. The first picosecond of dynamics is the relevant time scale for the transfer of the excitation, according to some sources in the literature. Our simulation results indicate that quantum correlations contribute a significant fraction of the total correlation during this first picosecond in many cases, at both cryogenic and physiological temperatures.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2010

Leggett-Garg inequalities and the geometry of the cut polytope

The Bell and Leggett-Garg tests offer operational ways to demonstrate that nonclassical behavior manifests itself in quantum systems, and experimentalists have implemented these protocols to show that classical worldviews such as local realism and macrorealism are false, respectively. Previous theoretical research has exposed important connections between more general Bell inequalities and polyhedral combinatorics. We show here that general Leggett-Garg inequalities are closely related to the cut polytope of the complete graph, a geometric object well-studied in combinatorics. Building on that connection, we offer a family of Leggett-Garg inequalities that are not trivial combinations of the most basic Leggett-Garg inequalities. We then show that violations of macrorealism can occur in surprising ways, by giving an example of a quantum system that violates the 'pentagon' Leggett-Garg inequality but does not violate any of the basic 'triangle' Leggett-Garg inequalities.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2010

Trade-off capacities of the quantum Hadamard channels

Coding theorems in quantum Shannon theory express the ultimate rates at which a sender can transmit information over a noisy quantum channel. More often than not, the known formulas expressing these transmission rates are intractable, requiring an optimization over an infinite number of uses of the channel. Researchers have rarely found quantum channels with a tractable classical or quantum capacity, but when such a finding occurs, it demonstrates a complete understanding of that channel's capabilities for transmitting classical or quantum information. Here we show that the three-dimensional capacity region for entanglement-assisted transmission of classical and quantum information is tractable for the Hadamard class of channels. Examples of Hadamard channels include generalized dephasing channels, cloning channels, and the Unruh channel. The generalized dephasing channels and the cloning channels are natural processes that occur in quantum systems through the loss of quantum coherence or stimulated emission, respectively. The Unruh channel is a noisy process that occurs in relativistic quantum information theory as a result of the Unruh effect and bears a strong relationship to the cloning channels. We give exact formulas for the entanglement-assisted classical and quantum communication capacity regions of these channels. The coding strategy for each of these examples is superior to a naieve time-sharing strategy, and we introduce a measure to determine this improvement.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2010

Entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional coding

We show how to protect a stream of quantum information from decoherence induced by a noisy quantum communication channel. We exploit preshared entanglement and a convolutional coding structure to develop a theory of entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional coding. Our construction produces a Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional code from two arbitrary classical binary convolutional codes. The rate and error-correcting properties of the classical convolutional codes directly determine the corresponding properties of the resulting entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional code. We explain how to encode our CSS entanglement-assisted quantum convolutional codes starting from a stream of information qubits, ancilla qubits, and shared entangled bits.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗