Digital signatures guarantee the authorship of electronic communications. Currently used "classical" signature schemes rely on unproven computational assumptions for security, while quantum signatures rely only on the laws of quantum mechanics to sign a classical message. Previous quantum signature schemes have used unambiguous quantum measurements. Such measurements, however, sometimes give no result, reducing the efficiency of the protocol. Here, we instead use heterodyne detection, which always gives a result, although there is always some uncertainty. We experimentally demonstrate feasibility in a real environment by distributing signature states through a noisy 1.6 km free-space channel. Our results show that continuous-variable heterodyne detection improves the signature rate for this type of scheme and therefore represents an interesting direction in the search for practical quantum signature schemes. For transmission values ranging from 100% to 10%, but otherwise assuming an ideal implementation with no other imperfections, the signature length is shorter by a factor of 2 to 10. As compared with previous relevant experimental realizations, the signature length in this implementation is several orders of magnitude shorter. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.100503 Digital signatures [1] are ubiquitous in electronic communication, used in, for example, Email and digital banking. They guarantee the provenance, integrity, and transferability of messages. Currently used classical digital signature schemes, however, rely on unproven computational assumptions [2], and may become insecure especially if quantum computers can be built [3]. Quantum digital signatures (QDSs) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10], on the other hand, give information-theoretic security [7], loosely speaking based on the fact that nonorthogonal quantum states cannot be perfectly distinguished from each other.The first quantum signature schemes assumed tamperproof, "authenticated" quantum communication links. Intuitively, this could be accomplished using parameter estimation techniques similar to those used in quantum key distribution (QKD). How to achieve this was explicitly shown only recently [10,11]. In addition, recent quantum signature schemes [6,9], including our protocol, do not require long-term quantum memory. Importantly, this means that quantum signatures can be implemented with current technology, essentially similar to QKD setups. "Classical" signature schemes with information-theoretic security also exist [12][13][14], but rely on secret shared keys, which could be accomplished using QKD. Quantum signature schemes may have some advantages over schemes relying on shared keys generated using QKD. In particular, the quantum bit error threshold for a signature scheme is in practice less strict than for distilling a secret shared key [11]. In addition, the required postprocessing is less demanding. Exactly what signature schemes are the most efficient, however, remains an open problem.Note that most QDS protocols, including this one, use quantu...

We provide experimental evidence of quantum features in bipartite states classified as entirely classical according to a conventional criterion based on the Glauber P function but possessing nonzero Gaussian quantum discord. Their quantum nature is experimentally revealed by acting locally on one part of the discordant state. We experimentally verify and investigate the effect of discord increase under the action of local loss and link it to the entanglement with the environment. Adding an environmental system purifying the state, we unveil the flow of quantum correlations within a global pure system using the Koashi-Winter inequality. For a discordant state generated by splitting a state in which the initial squeezing is destroyed by random displacements, we demonstrate the recovery of entanglement highlighting the role of system-environment correlations. As quantum information science develops towards quantum information technology, the question of the efficient use and optimization of resources becomes a burning issue. So far, quantum information processing (QIP) has been mostly thought of as entanglement-enabled technology. Quantum cryptography is an exception, but even there the so-called effective entanglement between the parties plays a decisive role [1,2]. With the advent of new quantum computation paradigms [3] interest in more generic and even nonentangled QIP resources has emerged [4]. Unlike entanglement, the new resources, commonly dubbed as quantum correlations, reside in all states which do not diagonalize in any local product basis. Entanglement and quantum correlations are equivalent notions only for pure states. Quantumness of correlations in separable states is fundamentally related to the noncommutativity of observables, nonorthogonality of states, and properties of quantum measurements, whereas entanglement can be seen as a consequence of the quantum superposition principle. Correlated mixed states are a lucid illustration of the fact that the quantum-classical divide is actually purpose-oriented and that such states, long considered unsuitable for QIP, may become a robust and efficient quantum tool.In what follows, we will use quantum discord [5] for quantification of quantum correlations. For two systems A and B, quantum discord is defined as the difference,between quantum mutual information I(AB) = S(A) + S(B) − S(AB) encompassing all correlations present in the system, and the one-way classical correlation, which is operationally related to the amount of perfect classical correlations which can be extracted from the system [6]. Here, S is the von Neumann entropy of the respective state, H {ˆ i } (A|B) is the conditional entropy with measurement on B, and the infimum is taken over all possible measurements {ˆ i }.In this Rapid Communication, we focus on bipartite mixed Gaussian states relevant in the context of continuousvariable quantum information [7]. The respective correlation quantifier is then Gaussian quantum discord [8,9] defined by Eq. (1), where the minimization in J ← (AB) is r...

Digital signatures ensure the integrity of a classical message and the authenticity of its sender. Despite their far-reaching use in modern communication, currently used signature schemes rely on computational assumptions and will be rendered insecure by a quantum computer. We present a quantum digital signatures (QDS) scheme whose security is instead based on the impossibility of perfectly and deterministically distinguishing between quantum states. Our continuous-variable (CV) scheme relies on phase measurement of a distributed alphabet of coherent states, and allows for secure message authentication against a quantum adversary performing collective beamsplitter and entangling-cloner attacks. Crucially, for the first time in the CV setting we allow for an eavesdropper on the quantum channels and yet retain shorter signature lengths than previous protocols with no eavesdropper. This opens up the possibility to implement CV QDS alongside existing CV quantum key distribution (QKD) platforms with minimal modification.

A beam splitter is a basic linear optical element appearing in many optics experiments and is frequently used as a continuous-variable entangler transforming a pair of input modes from a separable Gaussian state into an entangled state. However, a beam splitter is a passive operation that can create entanglement from Gaussian states only under certain conditions. One such condition is that the input light is suitably squeezed. We demonstrate, experimentally, that a beam splitter can create entanglement even from modes which do not possess such a squeezing provided that they are correlated to, but not entangled with, a third mode. Specifically, we show that a beam splitter can create three-mode entanglement by acting on two modes of a three-mode fully separable Gaussian state without entangling the two modes themselves. This beam splitter property is a key mechanism behind the performance of the protocol for entanglement distribution by separable states. Moreover, the property also finds application in collaborative quantum dense coding in which decoding of transmitted information is assisted by interference with a mode of the collaborating party.

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