Certification and quantification of multilevel quantum coherence

Ringbauer, Martin and Bromley, Thomas R. and Cianciaruso, Marco and Lami, Ludovico and Lau, W. Y. Sarah and Adesso, Gerardo and White, Andrew G. and Fedrizzi, Alessandro and Piani, Marco (2018) Certification and quantification of multilevel quantum coherence. Physical Review X, 8 (4). 041007. ISSN 2160-3308 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.041007)

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Abstract

Quantum coherence, present whenever a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple classically distinct states, marks one of the fundamental departures from classical physics. Quantum coherence has recently been investigated rigorously within a resource-theoretic formalism. However, the finer-grained notion of multilevel coherence, which explicitly takes into account the number of superposed classical states, has remained relatively unexplored. A comprehensive analysis of multi-level coherence, which acts as the single-party analogue to multi-partite entanglement, is essential for understanding natural quantum processes as well as for gauging the performance of quantum technologies. Here we develop the theoretical and experimental groundwork for characterizing and quantifying multilevel coherence. We prove that non-trivial levels of purity are required for multilevel coherence, as there is a ball of states around the maximally mixed state that do not exhibit multilevel coherence in any basis. We provide a simple necessary and sufficient analytical criterion to verify multilevel coherence, which leads to a complete classification for three-level systems. We present the robustness of multilevel coherence, a bona fide quantifier which we show to be numerically computable via semidefinite programming and experimentally accessible via multilevel coherence witnesses. We further verify and lower-bound the robustness of multilevel coherence by performing a semi-device-independent phase discrimination task, implemented experimentally with four-level probes in a photonic setup. Our results contribute to understanding the operational relevance of genuine multilevel coherence, also by demonstrating the key role it plays in enhanced phase discrimination---a primitive for quantum communication and metrology---and suggest new ways to reliably test the quantum behaviour of physical systems.

ORCID iDs

Ringbauer, Martin, Bromley, Thomas R., Cianciaruso, Marco, Lami, Ludovico, Lau, W. Y. Sarah, Adesso, Gerardo, White, Andrew G., Fedrizzi, Alessandro and Piani, Marco ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4698-9497;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:65535
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    31 December 2018
    Published
    10 October 2018
    Published Online
    18 September 2018
    Accepted
    Subjects:Science > Physics
    Department:Faculty of Science > Physics
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:25 Sep 2018 13:24
    Last modified:13 Nov 2024 01:14
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/65535
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