Erratum: Quantum Radar [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 200503 (2020)].

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.200503.

Quantum Metrology of Noisy Spreading Channels.

We provide the optimal measurement strategy for a class of noisy channels that reduce to the identity channel for a specific value of a parameter (spreading channels). We provide an example that is physically relevant: the estimation of the absolute value of the displacement in the presence of phase randomizing noise. Surprisingly, this noise does not affect the effectiveness of the optimal measurement. We show that, for small displacement, a squeezed vacuum probe field is optimal among strategies with same average energy. A squeezer followed by photodetection is the optimal detection strategy that attains the quantum Fisher information, whereas the customarily used homodyne detection becomes useless in the limit of small displacements, due to the same effect that gives Rayleigh's curse in optical superresolution. There is a quantum advantage: a squeezed or a Fock state with N average photons allow to asymptotically estimate the parameter with a sqrt[N] better precision than classical states with same energy.

Four Postulates of Quantum Mechanics Are Three.

The tensor product postulate of quantum mechanics states that the Hilbert space of a composite system is the tensor product of the components' Hilbert spaces. All current formalizations of quantum mechanics that do not contain this postulate contain some equivalent postulate or assumption (sometimes hidden). Here we give a natural definition of a composite system as a set containing the component systems and show how one can logically derive the tensor product rule from the state postulate and from the measurement postulate. In other words, our Letter reduces by one the number of postulates necessary to quantum mechanics.

Quantum Radar.

We propose a quantum metrology protocol for the localization of a noncooperative pointlike target in three-dimensional space, by illuminating it with electromagnetic waves. It employs all the spatial degrees of freedom of N entangled photons to achieve an uncertainty in localization that is sqrt[N] times smaller for each spatial direction than what could be achieved by N-independent photons or by classical light of the same average intensity.

Quantum Measurements of Time.

We propose a time-of-arrival operator in quantum mechanics by conditioning on a quantum clock. This allows us to bypass some of the problems of previous proposals, and to obtain a Hermitian time of arrival operator whose probability distribution arises from the Born rule and which has a clear physical interpretation. The same procedure can be employed to measure the "time at which some event happens" for arbitrary events (and not just specifically for the arrival time of a particle).

Digital Quantum Estimation.

Quantum metrology calculates the ultimate precision of all estimation strategies, measuring what is their root-mean-square error (RMSE) and their Fisher information. Here, instead, we ask how many bits of the parameter we can recover; namely, we derive an information-theoretic quantum metrology. In this setting, we redefine "Heisenberg bound" and "standard quantum limit" (the usual benchmarks in the quantum estimation theory) and show that the former can be attained only by sequential strategies or parallel strategies that employ entanglement among probes, whereas parallel-separable strategies are limited by the latter. We highlight the differences between this setting and the RMSE-based one.

High-dimensional entanglement certification.

Quantum entanglement is the ability of joint quantum systems to possess global properties (correlation among systems) even when subsystems have no definite individual property. Whilst the 2-dimensional (qubit) case is well-understood, currently, tools to characterise entanglement in high dimensions are limited. We experimentally demonstrate a new procedure for entanglement certification that is suitable for large systems, based entirely on information-theoretics. It scales more efficiently than Bell's inequality and entanglement witness. The method we developed works for arbitrarily large system dimension d and employs only two local measurements of complementary properties. This procedure can also certify whether the system is maximally entangled. We illustrate the protocol for families of bipartite states of qudits with dimension up to 32 composed of polarisation-entangled photon pairs.

Complementarity and correlations.

We provide an interpretation of entanglement based on classical correlations between measurement outcomes of complementary properties: States that have correlations beyond a certain threshold are entangled. The reverse is not true, however. We also show that, surprisingly, all separable nonclassical states exhibit smaller correlations for complementary observables than some strictly classical states. We use mutual information as a measure of classical correlations, but we conjecture that the first result holds also for other measures (e.g., the Pearson correlation coefficient or the sum of conditional probabilities).

Stronger uncertainty relations for all incompatible observables.

The Heisenberg-Robertson uncertainty relation expresses a limitation in the possible preparations of the system by giving a lower bound to the product of the variances of two observables in terms of their commutator. Notably, it does not capture the concept of incompatible observables because it can be trivial; i.e., the lower bound can be null even for two noncompatible observables. Here we give two stronger uncertainty relations, relating to the sum of variances, whose lower bound is guaranteed to be nontrivial whenever the two observables are incompatible on the state of the system.

Using entanglement against noise in quantum metrology.

We analyze the role of entanglement among probes and with external ancillas in quantum metrology. In the absence of noise, it is known that unentangled sequential strategies can achieve the same Heisenberg scaling of entangled strategies and that external ancillas are useless. This changes in the presence of noise; here we prove that entangled strategies can have higher precision than unentangled ones and that the addition of passive external ancillas can also increase the precision. We analyze some specific noise models and use the results to conjecture a general hierarchy for quantum metrology strategies in the presence of noise.

Efficient universal blind quantum computation.

We give a cheat sensitive protocol for blind universal quantum computation that is efficient in terms of computational and communication resources: it allows one party to perform an arbitrary computation on a second party's quantum computer without revealing either which computation is performed, or its input and output. The first party's computational capabilities can be extremely limited: she must only be able to create and measure single-qubit superposition states. The second party is not required to use measurement-based quantum computation. The protocol requires the (optimal) exchange of O(Jlog2(N)) single-qubit states, where J is the computational depth and N is the number of qubits needed for the computation.

Sub-Heisenberg estimation strategies are ineffective.

In interferometry, sub-Heisenberg strategies claim to achieve a phase estimation error smaller than the inverse of the mean number of photons employed (Heisenberg bound). Here we show that one can achieve a comparable precision without performing any measurement, just using the large prior information that sub-Heisenberg strategies require. For uniform prior (i.e., no prior information), we prove that these strategies cannot achieve more than a fixed gain of about 1.73 over Heisenberg-limited interferometry. Analogous results hold for arbitrary single-mode prior distributions. These results extend also beyond interferometry: the effective error in estimating any parameter is lower bounded by a quantity proportional to the inverse expectation value (above a ground state) of the generator of translations of the parameter.

Phase estimation via quantum interferometry for noisy detectors.

The sensitivity in optical interferometry is strongly affected by losses during the signal propagation or at the detection stage. The optimal quantum states of the probing signals in the presence of loss were recently found. However, in many cases of practical interest, their associated accuracy is worse than the one obtainable without employing quantum resources (e.g., entanglement and squeezing) but neglecting the detector's loss. Here, we detail an experiment that can reach the latter even in the presence of imperfect detectors: it employs a phase-sensitive amplification of the signals after the phase sensing, before the detection. We experimentally demonstrated the feasibility of a phase estimation experiment able to reach its optimal working regime. Since our method uses coherent states as input signals, it is a practical technique that can be used for high-sensitivity interferometry and, in contrast to the optimal strategies, does not require one to have an exact characterization of the loss beforehand.

Quantum measurement bounds beyond the uncertainty relations.

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty relations and the Cramér-Rao inequalities typically limit the precision in the estimation of a parameter through the standard deviation of a conjugate observable. Here we extend these relations by giving a bound to the precision of a parameter in terms of the expectation value of the conjugate observable. This has both foundational and practical consequences: in quantum optics it resolves a controversy over which is the ultimate precision in interferometry.

Sequential projective measurements for channel decoding.

We study the transmission of classical information in quantum channels. We present a decoding procedure that is very simple but still achieves the channel capacity. It is used to give an alternative straightforward proof that the classical capacity is given by the regularized Holevo bound. This procedure uses only projective measurements and is based on successive "yes-no" tests only.

Closed timelike curves via postselection: theory and experimental test of consistency.

Closed timelike curves (CTCs) are trajectories in spacetime that effectively travel backwards in time: a test particle following a CTC can interact with its former self in the past. A widely accepted quantum theory of CTCs was proposed by Deutsch. Here we analyze an alternative quantum formulation of CTCs based on teleportation and postselection, and show that it is inequivalent to Deutsch's. The predictions or retrodictions of our theory can be simulated experimentally: we report the results of an experiment illustrating how in our particular theory the "grandfather paradox" is resolved.

Sub-Rayleigh imaging via N-photon detection.

The Rayleigh diffraction bound sets the minimum separation for two point objects to be distinguishable in a conventional imaging system. We demonstrate sub-Rayleigh resolution by scanning a focused beam--in an arbitrary, object-covering pattern that is unknown to the imager--and using N-photon photodetection implemented with a single-photon avalanche detector array. Experiments show resolution improvement by a factor ∼(N-N(max))(½) beyond the Rayleigh bound, where N(max) is the maximum average detected photon number in the image, in good agreement with theory.

Quantum solution to the arrow-of-time dilemma.

The arrow-of-time dilemma states that the laws of physics are invariant for time inversion, whereas the familiar phenomena we see everyday are not (i.e., entropy increases). I show that, within a quantum mechanical framework, all phenomena which leave a trail of information behind (and hence can be studied by physics) are those where entropy necessarily increases or remains constant. All phenomena where the entropy decreases must not leave any information of their having happened. This situation is completely indistinguishable from their not having happened at all. In the light of this observation, the second law of thermodynamics is reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study those processes where entropy has decreased, even if they were commonplace.

Quantum illumination with Gaussian states.

An optical transmitter irradiates a target region containing a bright thermal-noise bath in which a low-reflectivity object might be embedded. The light received from this region is used to decide whether the object is present or absent. The performance achieved using a coherent-state transmitter is compared with that of a quantum-illumination transmitter, i.e., one that employs the signal beam obtained from spontaneous parametric down-conversion. By making the optimum joint measurement on the light received from the target region together with the retained spontaneous parametric down-conversion idler beam, the quantum-illumination system realizes a 6 dB advantage in the error-probability exponent over the optimum reception coherent-state system. This advantage accrues despite there being no entanglement between the light collected from the target region and the retained idler beam.

Quantum private queries.

We propose a cheat sensitive quantum protocol to perform a private search on a classical database which is efficient in terms of communication complexity. It allows a user to retrieve an item from the database provider without revealing which item he or she retrieved: if the provider tries to obtain information on the query, the person querying the database can find it out. The protocol ensures also perfect data privacy of the database: the information that the user can retrieve in a single query is bounded and does not depend on the size of the database. With respect to the known (quantum and classical) strategies for private information retrieval, our protocol displays an exponential reduction in communication complexity and in running-time computational complexity.