No abstract

Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) steering is one of the most intriguing features of quantum mechanics and an important resource for quantum communication. For practical applications, it remains a challenge to protect EPR steering from decoherence due to its intrinsic difference from entanglement. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the distillation of Gaussian EPR steering and entanglement in lossy and noisy environments using measurement-based noiseless linear amplification. Different from entanglement distillation, the extension of steerable region happens in the distillation of EPR steering, besides the enhancement of steerabilities. We demonstrate that the two-way or one-way steerable region is extended after the distillation of EPR steering when the NLA is implemented based on Bob’s or Alice’s measurement results. We also show that the NLA helps to extract the secret key from the insecure region in one-sided device-independent quantum key distribution with EPR steering. Our work paves the way for quantum communication exploiting EPR steering in practical quantum channels.

Heisenberg's original uncertainty relation is related to measurement effect, which is different from the preparation uncertainty relation. However, it has been shown that Heisenberg's errordisturbance uncertainty relation can be violated in some cases. We experimentally test the errortradeoff uncertainty relation by using a continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entangled state. Based on the quantum correlation between the two entangled optical beams, the errors on amplitude and phase quadratures of one EPR optical beam coming from joint measurement are estimated respectively, which are used to verify the error-tradeoff relation. Especially, the errortradeoff relation for error-free measurement of one observable is verified in our experiment. We also verify the error-tradeoff relations for nonzero errors and mixed state by introducing loss on one EPR beam. Our experimental results demonstrate that Heisenberg's error-tradeoff uncertainty relation is violated in some cases for a continuous-variable system, while the Ozawa's and Brainciard's relations are valid.I.

Optical cat state plays an essential role in quantum computation and quantum metrology. Here, we experimentally quantify quantum coherence of an optical cat state by means of relative entropy and l 1 norm of coherence in Fock basis based on the prepared optical cat state at rubidium D1 line. By transmitting the optical cat state through a lossy channel, we also demonstrate the robustness of quantum coherence of optical cat state in the presence of loss, which is different from the decoherence properties of fidelity and Wigner function negativity of the optical cat state. Our results confirm that quantum coherence of optical cat states is robust against loss and pave the way for the application with optical cat states.

Besides quantum entanglement and steering, quantum coherence has also been identified as a useful quantum resource in quantum information. It is important to investigate the evolution of quantum coherence in practical quantum channels. In this paper, we experimentally quantify the quantum coherence of a squeezed state and a Gaussian Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) entangled state transmitted in Gaussian thermal noise channel. By reconstructing the covariance matrix of the transmitted states, quantum coherence of these Gaussian states is quantified by calculating the relative entropy. We show that quantum coherence of the squeezed state and the Gaussian EPR entangled state is robust against loss and noise in a quantum channel, which is different from the properties of squeezing and Gaussian entanglement. Our experimental results pave the way for application of Gaussian quantum coherence in lossy and noisy environments.