Entangled States Are Harder to Transfer than Product States.

The distribution of entangled states is a key task of utmost importance for many quantum information processing protocols. A commonly adopted setup for distributing quantum states envisages the creation of the state in one location, which is then sent to (possibly different) distant receivers through some quantum channels. While it is undoubted and, perhaps, intuitively expected that the distribution of entangled quantum states is less efficient than that of product states, a thorough quantification of this inefficiency (namely, of the difference between the quantum-state transfer fidelity for entangled and factorized states) has not been performed. To this end, in this work, we consider n-independent amplitude-damping channels, acting in parallel, i.e., each, locally, on one part of an n-qubit state. We derive exact analytical results for the fidelity decrease, with respect to the case of product states, in the presence of entanglement in the initial state, for up to four qubits. Interestingly, we find that genuine multipartite entanglement has a more detrimental effect on the fidelity than two-qubit entanglement. Our results hint at the fact that, for larger n-qubit states, the difference in the average fidelity between product and entangled states increases with increasing single-qubit fidelity, thus making the latter a less trustworthy figure of merit.

Optimal Work Extraction and Thermodynamics of Quantum Measurements and Correlations.

We analyze the role of indirect quantum measurements in work extraction from quantum systems in nonequilibrium states. In particular, we focus on the work that can be obtained by exploiting the correlations shared between the system of interest and an additional ancilla, where measurement backaction introduces a nontrivial thermodynamic tradeoff. We present optimal state-dependent protocols for extracting work from both classical and quantum correlations, the latter being measured by discord. Our quantitative analysis establishes that, while the work content of classical correlations can be fully extracted by performing local operations on the system of interest, accessing work related to quantum discord requires a specific driving protocol that includes interaction between system and ancilla.

Quantum Critical Scaling under Periodic Driving.

Universality is key to the theory of phase transitions, stating that the equilibrium properties of observables near a phase transition can be classified according to few critical exponents. These exponents rule an universal scaling behaviour that witnesses the irrelevance of the model's microscopic details at criticality. Here we discuss the persistence of such a scaling in a one-dimensional quantum Ising model under sinusoidal modulation in time of its transverse magnetic field. We show that scaling of various quantities (concurrence, entanglement entropy, magnetic and fidelity susceptibility) endures up to a stroboscopic time τ bd , proportional to the size of the system. This behaviour is explained by noticing that the low-energy modes, responsible for the scaling properties, are resilient to the absorption of energy. Our results suggest that relevant features of the universality do hold also when the system is brought out-of-equilibrium by a periodic driving.

Quantum Zeno-type effect and non-Markovianity in a three-level system.

We study the coexistence of the quantum Zeno-type effect and non-Markovianity for a system decaying in a structured bosonic environment and subject to a control field. The interaction with the environment induces decay from the excited to the ground level, which, in turn, is coherently coupled to another meta-stable state. The control of the strength of the coherent coupling between the stable levels allows the engineering of both the dissipation and of the memory effects, without modifying neither the system-reservoir interaction, nor environmental properties. We use this framework in two different parameter regimes corresponding to fast (bad cavity limit) and slow dissipation (good cavity limit) in the original and un-controlled qubit system. Our results show a non-monotonic behavior of memory effects when increasing the effectiveness of the Zeno-like freezing. Moreover, we identify a new source of memory effects which allows the persistence of non-Markovianity for long times while the excited state has already been depleted.

Statistics of work and orthogonality catastrophe in discrete level systems: an application to fullerene molecules and ultra-cold trapped Fermi gases.

The sudden introduction of a local impurity in a Fermi sea leads to an anomalous disturbance of its quantum state that represents a local quench, leaving the system out of equilibrium and giving rise to the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe. The statistics of the work done describe the energy fluctuations produced by the quench, providing an accurate and detailed insight into the fundamental physics of the process. We present here a numerical approach to the non-equilibrium work distribution, supported by applications to phenomena occurring at very diverse energy ranges. One of them is the valence electron shake-up induced by photo-ionization of a core state in a fullerene molecule. The other is the response of an ultra-cold gas of trapped fermions to an embedded two-level atom excited by a fast pulse. Working at low thermal energies, we detect the primary role played by many-particle states of the perturbed system with one or two excited fermions. We validate our approach through the comparison with some photoemission data on fullerene films and previous analytical calculations on harmonically trapped Fermi gases.

Discording power of quantum evolutions.

We introduce the discording power of a unitary transformation, which assesses its capability to produce quantum discord, and analyze in detail the generation of discord by relevant classes of two-qubit gates. Our measure is based on the Cartan decomposition of two-qubit unitaries and on evaluating the maximum discord achievable by a unitary upon acting on classical-classical states at fixed purity. We find that there exist gates which are perfect discorders for any value of purity µ, and that they belong to a class of operators that includes the sqrt[SWAP]. Other gates, even those universal for quantum computation, do not possess the same property: the CNOT, for example, is a perfect discorder only for states with low or unit purity, but not for intermediate values. The discording power of a two-qubit unitary also provides a generalization of the corresponding measure defined for entanglement to any value of the purity.

Protecting entanglement via the quantum Zeno effect.

We study the exact entanglement dynamics of two atoms in a lossy resonator. Besides discussing the steady-state entanglement, we show that in the strong coupling regime the system-reservoir correlations induce entanglement revivals and oscillations and propose a strategy to fight against the deterioration of the entanglement using the quantum Zeno effect.

Local control of entanglement in a spin chain.

In a ferromagnetic spin chain, the control of the local effective magnetic field allows us to manipulate the static and dynamical properties of entanglement. In particular, the propagation of quantum correlations can be driven to a great extent so as to achieve an entanglement transfer on demand toward a selected site.