Approaching Tsirelson's Bound in a Photon Pair Experiment.

We present an experimental test of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt Bell inequality on photon pairs in a maximally entangled state of polarization in which a value S=2.82759±0.00051 is observed. This value comes close to the Tsirelson bound of |S|≤2sqrt[2], with S-2sqrt[2]=0.00084±0.00051. It also violates the bound |S|≤2.82537 introduced by Grinbaum by 4.3 standard deviations. This violation allows us to exclude that quantum mechanics is only an effective description of a more fundamental theory.

Demonstrating an absolute quantum advantage in direct absorption measurement.

Engineering apparatus that harness quantum theory promises to offer practical advantages over current technology. A fundamentally more powerful prospect is that such quantum technologies could out-perform any future iteration of their classical counterparts, no matter how well the attributes of those classical strategies can be improved. Here, for optical direct absorption measurement, we experimentally demonstrate such an instance of an absolute advantage per photon probe that is exposed to the absorbative sample. We use correlated intensity measurements of spontaneous parametric downconversion using a commercially available air-cooled CCD, a new estimator for data analysis and a high heralding efficiency photon-pair source. We show this enables improvement in the precision of measurement, per photon probe, beyond what is achievable with an ideal coherent state (a perfect laser) detected with 100% efficient and noiseless detection. We see this absolute improvement for up to 50% absorption, with a maximum observed factor of improvement of 1.46. This equates to around 32% reduction in the total number of photons traversing an optical sample, compared to any future direct optical absorption measurement using classical light.

Experimental implementation of bit commitment in the noisy-storage model.

Fundamental primitives such as bit commitment and oblivious transfer serve as building blocks for many other two-party protocols. Hence, the secure implementation of such primitives is important in modern cryptography. Here we present a bit commitment protocol that is secure as long as the attacker's quantum memory device is imperfect. The latter assumption is known as the noisy-storage model. We experimentally executed this protocol by performing measurements on polarization-entangled photon pairs. Our work includes a full security analysis, accounting for all experimental error rates and finite size effects. This demonstrates the feasibility of two-party protocols in this model using real-world quantum devices. Finally, we provide a general analysis of our bit commitment protocol for a range of experimental parameters.