Unbounded Violation of Quantum Steering Inequalities.

We construct steering inequalities that exhibit unbounded violation. The concept was to exploit the relationship between steering violation and the uncertainty relation. To this end, we apply mutually unbiased bases and anticommuting observables, known to exhibit the strongest uncertainty. In both cases, we are able to procure unbounded violations. Our approach is much more constructive and transparent than the operator space theory approach employed to obtain large violation of Bell inequalities. Importantly, using anticommuting observables we are able to obtain a dichotomic steering inequality with unbounded violation. Thus far, there is no analogous result for Bell inequalities. Interestingly, both the dichotomic inequality and one of our inequalities cannot be directly obtained from existing uncertainty relations, which strongly suggest the existence of an unknown kind of uncertainty relation.

Quantifying contextuality.

Contextuality is central to both the foundations of quantum theory and to the novel information processing tasks. Despite some recent proposals, it still faces a fundamental problem: how to quantify its presence? In this work, we provide a universal framework for quantifying contextuality. We conduct two complementary approaches: (i) the bottom-up approach, where we introduce a communication game, which grasps the phenomenon of contextuality in a quantitative manner; (ii) the top-down approach, where we just postulate two measures, relative entropy of contextuality and contextuality cost, analogous to existent measures of nonlocality (a special case of contextuality). We then match the two approaches by showing that the measure emerging from the communication scenario turns out to be equal to the relative entropy of contextuality. Our framework allows for the quantitative, resource-type comparison of completely different games. We give analytical formulas for the proposed measures for some contextual systems, showing in particular that the Peres-Mermin game is by order of magnitude more contextual than that of Klyachko et al. Furthermore, we explore properties of these measures such as monotonicity or additivity.

Entangled inputs cannot make imperfect quantum channels perfect.

Entangled inputs can enhance the capacity of quantum channels, this being one of the consequences of the celebrated result showing the nonadditivity of several quantities relevant for quantum information science. In this work, we answer the converse question (whether entangled inputs can ever render noisy quantum channels to have maximum capacity) to the negative: No sophisticated entangled input of any quantum channel can ever enhance the capacity to the maximum possible value, a result that holds true for all channels both for the classical as well as the quantum capacity. This result can hence be seen as a bound as to how "nonadditive quantum information can be." As a main result, we find first practical and remarkably simple computable single-shot bounds to capacities, related to entanglement measures. As examples, we discuss the qubit amplitude damping and identify the first meaningful bound for its classical capacity.

Asymptotic manipulations of entanglement can exhibit genuine irreversibility

It is commonly believed that distillation of entanglement can be, in general, irreversible. Perhaps the strongest evidence is constituted by the existence of the bound entangled states. However, even a single example of state exhibiting this irreversibility has not been found so far. We show that for a family of states the process of distillation of entanglement is truly irreversible. These states have a nonzero amount of bound entanglement and, at most, a very small amount of free entanglement.

Unified approach to quantum capacities: towards quantum noisy coding theorem

Based on a unified approach to all kinds of quantum capacities we show that the rate of quantum information transmission is bounded by the maximal attainable rate of coherent information. Moreover, we show that if for any bipartite state the one-way distillable entanglement is no less than coherent information, then one obtains Shannon-like formulas for all the capacities. The inequality also implies that the decrease of distillable entanglement due to the mixing process does not exceed that of the corresponding loss of information about a system.

Unconditional privacy over channels which cannot convey quantum information.

Quantum cryptography enables one to verify that the state of the quantum system has not been tampered with and thus one can obtain privacy regardless of the power of the eavesdropper. All previous protocols relied on the ability to faithfully send quantum states or equivalently to share pure entanglement. Here we show this need not be the case-one can obtain verifiable privacy even through some channels which cannot be used to reliably send quantum states.

Limits for entanglement measures.

The basic principle of entanglement processing says that entanglement cannot increase under local operations and classical communication. Based on this principle, we show that any entanglement measure E suitable for the regime of a high number of identically prepared entangled pairs satisfies ED < or = E < or = EF, where ED and EF are the entanglement of distillation and formation, respectively. Moreover, we exhibit a theorem establishing a very general form of bounds for distillable entanglement.