More Entanglement Implies Higher Performance in Channel Discrimination Tasks.

We show that every entangled state provides an advantage in ancilla-assisted bi- and multichannel discrimination that singles out its degree of entanglement, quantified in terms of the Schmidt number. The Schmidt-number robustness provides a compelling quantification of such an advantage, and, remarkably, the well-known robustness of entanglement exactly provides the largest multiplicative advantage an entangled state can provide compared to the case where no ancilla is used in a channel discrimination task.

Generic Emergence of Objectivity of Observables in Infinite Dimensions.

Quantum Darwinism posits that information becomes objective whenever multiple observers indirectly probe a quantum system by each measuring a fraction of the environment. It was recently shown that objectivity of observables emerges generically from the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, whenever the system of interest has finite dimensions and the number of environment fragments is large [F. G. S. L. Brandão, M. Piani, and P. Horodecki, Nat. Commun. 6, 7908 (2015)NCAOBW2041-172310.1038/ncomms8908]. Despite the importance of this result, it necessarily excludes many practical systems of interest that are infinite dimensional, including harmonic oscillators. Extending the study of quantum Darwinism to infinite dimensions is a nontrivial task: we tackle it here by using a modified diamond norm, suitable to quantify the distinguishability of channels in infinite dimensions. We prove two theorems that bound the emergence of objectivity, first for finite mean energy systems, and then for systems that can only be prepared in states with an exponential energy cutoff. We show that the latter class includes any bounded-energy subset of single-mode Gaussian states.

Hierarchy of Efficiently Computable and Faithful Lower Bounds to Quantum Discord.

Quantum discord expresses a fundamental nonclassicality of correlations that is more general than entanglement, but that, in its standard definition, is not easily evaluated. We derive a hierarchy of computationally efficient lower bounds to the standard quantum discord. Every nontrivial element of the hierarchy constitutes by itself a valid discordlike measure, based on a fundamental feature of quantum correlations: their lack of shareability. Our approach emphasizes how the difference between entanglement and discord depends on whether shareability is intended as a static property or as a dynamical process.

Robustness of Coherence: An Operational and Observable Measure of Quantum Coherence.

Quantifying coherence is an essential endeavor for both quantum foundations and quantum technologies. Here, the robustness of coherence is defined and proven to be a full monotone in the context of the recently introduced resource theories of quantum coherence. The measure is shown to be observable, as it can be recast as the expectation value of a coherence witness operator for any quantum state. The robustness of coherence is evaluated analytically on relevant classes of states, and an efficient semidefinite program that computes it on general states is given. An operational interpretation is finally provided: the robustness of coherence quantifies the advantage enabled by a quantum state in a phase discrimination task.

Should Entanglement Measures be Monogamous or Faithful?

"Is entanglement monogamous?" asks the title of a popular article [B. Terhal, IBM J. Res. Dev. 48, 71 (2004)], celebrating C. H. Bennett's legacy on quantum information theory. While the answer is affirmative in the qualitative sense, the situation is less clear if monogamy is intended as a quantitative limitation on the distribution of bipartite entanglement in a multipartite system, given some particular measure of entanglement. Here, we formalize what it takes for a bipartite measure of entanglement to obey a general quantitative monogamy relation on all quantum states. We then prove that an important class of entanglement measures fail to be monogamous in this general sense of the term, with monogamy violations becoming generic with increasing dimension. In particular, we show that every additive and suitably normalized entanglement measure cannot satisfy any nontrivial general monogamy relation while at the same time faithfully capturing the geometric entanglement structure of the fully antisymmetric state in arbitrary dimension. Nevertheless, monogamy of such entanglement measures can be recovered if one allows for dimension-dependent relations, as we show explicitly with relevant examples.

Necessary and sufficient quantum information characterization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering.

Steering is the entanglement-based quantum effect that embodies the "spooky action at a distance" disliked by Einstein and scrutinized by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Here we provide a necessary and sufficient characterization of steering, based on a quantum information processing task: the discrimination of branches in a quantum evolution, which we dub subchannel discrimination. We prove that, for any bipartite steerable state, there are instances of the quantum subchannel discrimination problem for which this state allows a correct discrimination with strictly higher probability than in the absence of entanglement, even when measurements are restricted to local measurements aided by one-way communication. On the other hand, unsteerable states are useless in such conditions, even when entangled. We also prove that the above steering advantage can be exactly quantified in terms of the steering robustness, which is a natural measure of the steerability exhibited by the state.

Experimental entanglement activation from discord in a programmable quantum measurement.

In quantum mechanics, observing is not a passive act. Consider a system of two quantum particles A and B: if a measurement apparatus M is used to make an observation on B, the overall state of the system AB will typically be altered. When this happens, no matter which local measurement is performed, the two objects A and B are revealed to possess peculiar correlations known as quantum discord. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that the very act of local observation gives rise to an activation protocol which converts discord into distillable entanglement, a stronger and more useful form of quantum correlations, between the apparatus M and the composite system AB. We adopt a flexible two-photon setup to realize a three-qubit system (A, B, M) with programmable degrees of initial correlations, measurement interaction, and characterization processes. Our experiment demonstrates the fundamental mechanism underpinning the ubiquitous act of observing the quantum world and establishes the potential of discord in entanglement generation.

Are general quantum correlations monogamous?

Quantum entanglement and quantum nonlocality are known to exhibit monogamy; that is, they obey strong constraints on how they can be distributed among multipartite systems. Quantum correlations that comprise and go beyond entanglement are quantified by, e.g., quantum discord. It was observed recently that for some states quantum discord is not monogamous. We prove, in general, that any measure of correlations that is monogamous for all states and satisfies reasonable basic properties must vanish for all separable states: only entanglement measures can be strictly monogamous. Monogamy of other than entanglement measures can still be satisfied for special, restricted cases: we prove that the geometric measure of discord satisfies the monogamy inequality on all pure states of three qubits.

All nonclassical correlations can be activated into distillable entanglement.

We devise a protocol in which general nonclassical multipartite correlations produce a physically relevant effect, leading to the creation of bipartite entanglement. In particular, we show that the relative entropy of quantumness, which measures all nonclassical correlations among subsystems of a quantum system, is equivalent to and can be operationally interpreted as the minimum distillable entanglement generated between the system and local ancillae in our protocol. We emphasize the key role of state mixedness in maximizing nonclassicality: Mixed entangled states can be arbitrarily more nonclassical than separable and pure entangled states.

Experimental bound entanglement in a four-photon state.

Bound entanglement is central to many exciting theoretical results in quantum information processing, but has thus far not been experimentally realized. In this work, we consider a one-parameter family of four-qubit Smolin states. We experimentally produce these states in the polarization of four optical photons produced from parametric down-conversion. Within a range of the parameter, we show that our states are entangled and undistillable, and thus bound entangled. Using these bound-entangled states we demonstrate entanglement unlocking.

Generic emergence of classical features in quantum Darwinism.

Quantum Darwinism posits that only specific information about a quantum system that is redundantly proliferated to many parts of its environment becomes accessible and objective, leading to the emergence of classical reality. However, it is not clear under what conditions this mechanism holds true. Here we prove that the emergence of classical features along the lines of quantum Darwinism is a general feature of any quantum dynamics: observers who acquire information indirectly through the environment have effective access at most to classical information about one and the same measurement of the quantum system. Our analysis does not rely on a strict conceptual splitting between a system-of-interest and its environment, and allows one to interpret any system as part of the environment of any other system. Finally, our approach leads to a full operational characterization of quantum discord in terms of local redistribution of correlations.

All entangled states are useful for channel discrimination.

We prove that every entangled state is useful as a resource for the problem of minimum-error channel discrimination. More specifically, given a single copy of an arbitrary bipartite entangled state, it holds that there is an instance of a quantum channel discrimination task for which this state allows for a correct discrimination with strictly higher probability than every separable state.

No-local-broadcasting theorem for multipartite quantum correlations.

We prove that the correlations present in a multipartite quantum state have an operational quantum character even if the state is unentangled, as long as it does not simply encode a multipartite classical probability distribution. Said quantumness is revealed by the new task of local broadcasting, i.e., of locally sharing preestablished correlations, which is feasible if and only if correlations are stricly classical. Our operational approach leads to natural definitions of measures for quantumness of correlations. It also reproduces the standard no-broadcasting theorem as a special case.

Environment induced entanglement in Markovian dissipative dynamics.

We show that two, noninteracting two-level systems, immersed in a common bath, can become mutually entangled when evolving according to a Markovian, completely positive reduced dynamics.