Philipp Hyllus

Experimental detection of multipartite entanglement using witness operators

We present the experimental detection of genuine multipartite entanglement using entanglement witness operators. To this aim we introduce a canonical way of constructing and decomposing witness operators so that they can be directly implemented with present technology. We apply this method to three- and four-qubit entangled states of polarized photons, giving experimental evidence that the considered states contain true multipartite entanglement.

Fisher information and multiparticle entanglement

The Fisher information F gives a limit to the ultimate precision achievable in a phase estimation protocol. It has been shown recently that the Fisher information for a linear two-mode interferometer cannot exceed the number of particles if the input state is separable. As a direct consequence, with such input states the shot-noise limit is the ultimate limit of precision. In this work, we go a step further by deducing bounds on F for several multiparticle entanglement classes. These bounds imply that genuine multiparticle entanglement is needed for reaching the highest sensitivities in quantum interferometry. We further compute similar bounds on the average Fisher information F for collective spin operators, where the average is performed over all possible spin directions. We show that these criteria detect different sets of states and illustrate their strengths by considering several examples, also using experimental data. In particular, the criterion based on F is able to detect certain bound entangled states.

Detection of entanglement with few local measurements

We introduce a general method for the experimental detection of entanglement by performing only few local measurements, assuming some prior knowledge of the density matrix. The idea is based on the minimal decomposition of witness operators into a pseudomixture of local operators. We discuss an experimentally relevant case of two qubits, and show an example how bound entanglement can be detected with few local measurements.

Bell Inequalities for Graph States

We investigate the nonlocal properties of graph states. To this aim, we derive a family of Bell inequalities which require three measurement settings for each party and are maximally violated by graph states. In turn, for each graph state there is an inequality maximally violated only by that state. We show that for certain types of graph states the violation of these inequalities increases exponentially with the number of qubits. We also discuss connections to other entanglement properties such as the positivity of the partial transpose or the geometric measure of entanglement.

Covariance matrices and the separability problem.

We propose a unifying approach to the separability problem using covariance matrices of locally measurable observables. From a practical point of view, our approach leads to strong entanglement criteria that allow us to detect the entanglement of many bound entangled states in higher dimensions and which are at the same time necessary and sufficient for two qubits. From a fundamental perspective, our approach leads to insights into the relations between several known entanglement criteria--such as the computable cross-norm and local uncertainty criteria--as well as their limitations.

Relations between Entanglement Witnesses and Bell Inequalities

Bell inequalities, considered within quantum mechanics, can be regarded as nonoptimal witness operators. We discuss the relationship between such Bell witnesses and general entanglement witnesses in detail for the Bell inequality derived by Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt (CHSH) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 23, 880 (1969)]. We derive bounds on how much an optimal witness has to be shifted by adding the identity operator to make it positive on all states admitting a local hidden variable model. In the opposite direction, we obtain tight bounds for the maximal proportion of the identity operator that can be subtracted from such a CHSH witness, while preserving the witness properties. Finally, we investigate the structure of CHSH witnesses directly by relating their diagonalized form to optimal witnesses of two different classes.

Useful Multiparticle Entanglement and Sub-Shot-Noise Sensitivity in Experimental Phase Estimation

We experimentally demonstrate a general criterion to identify entangled states useful for the estimation of an unknown phase shift with a sensitivity higher than the shot-noise limit. We show how to exploit this entanglement on the examples of a maximum likelihood as well as of a Bayesian phase estimation protocol. Using an entangled four-photon state we achieve a phase sensitivity clearly beyond the shot-noise limit. Our detailed comparison of methods and quantum states for entanglement enhanced metrology reveals the connection between multiparticle entanglement and sub-shot-noise uncertainty, both in a frequentist and in a Bayesian phase estimation setting.

Entanglement and Sensitivity in Precision Measurements with States of a Fluctuating Number of Particles

The concepts of separability, entanglement, spin squeezing, and the Heisenberg limit are central in the theory of quantum-enhanced metrology. In the current literature, these are well established only in the case of linear interferometers operating with input quantum states of a known fixed number of particles. This manuscript generalizes these concepts and extends the quantum phase estimation theory by taking into account classical and quantum fluctuations of the particle number. Our analysis concerns most of the current experiments on precision measurements where the number of particles is known only on average.

Optimal entanglement witnesses for continuous-variable systems

This paper is concerned with all tests for continuous-variable entanglement that arise from linear combinations of second moments or variances of canonical coordinates, as they are commonly used in experiments to detect entanglement. All such tests for bi-partite and multi-partite entanglement correspond to hyperplanes in the set of second moments. It is shown that all optimal tests, those that are most robust against imperfections with respect to some figure of merit for a given state, can be constructed from solutions to semi-definite optimization problems. Moreover, we show that for each such test, referred to as an entanglement witness based on second moments, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the witness and a stronger product criterion, which amounts to a nonlinear witness, based on the same measurements. This generalizes the known product criteria. The presented tests are all applicable also to non-Gaussian states. To provide a service to the community, we present the documentation of two numerical routines, FullyWit and MultiWit, which have been made publicly available.

Complete hierarchies of efficient approximations to problems in entanglement theory

We investigate several problems in entanglement theory from the perspective of convex optimization. This list of problems comprises (A) the decision whether a state is multi-party entangled, (B) the minimization of expectation values of entanglement witnesses with respect to pure product states, (C) the closely related evaluation of the geometric measure of entanglement to quantify pure multi-party entanglement, (D) the test whether states are multi-party entangled on the basis of witnesses based on second moments and on the basis of linear entropic criteria, and (E) the evaluation of instances of maximal output purities of quantum channels. We show that these problems can be formulated as certain optimization problems: as polynomially constrained problems employing polynomials of degree three or less. We then apply very recently established known methods from the theory of semi-definite relaxations to the formulated optimization problems. By this construction we arrive at a hierarchy of efficiently solvable approximations to the solution, approximating the exact solution as closely as desired, in a way that is asymptotically complete. For example, this results in a hierarchy of novel, efficiently decidable sufficient criteria for multi-particle entanglement, such that every entangled state will necessarily be detected in some step of the hierarchy. Finally, we present numerical examples to demonstrate the practical accessibility of this approach.