We introduce a method to lower bound an entropy-based measure of genuine multipartite entanglement via nonlinear entanglement witnesses. We show that some of these bounds are tight and explicitly work out their connection to a framework of nonlinear witnesses that were published recently. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of these lower bounds in the context of other possible bounds and measures. In exemplary cases, we show that only a few local measurements are necessary to determine these lower bounds.

It is shown that the maximal phase sensitivity of a two-path interferometer with high-intensity coherent light and squeezed vacuum in the input ports can be achieved by photon-number-resolving detection of only a small number of photons in a dark output port. It is then possible to achieve the quantum Cramér-Rao bound of the two-path interferometer using only the field displacement dependence of the photon number statistics in the single mode output of the dark port represented by a field-displaced squeezed vacuum state. We find that, at small field displacements, it is not sufficient to use the average photon number as the estimator, indicating that an optimal phase estimation depends critically on measurements of the precise photon number. We therefore analyze the effect of detection efficiency on the Fisher information and show that there is a transition from low robustness against photon losses associated with quantum interference effects at low field displacements to high robustness against photon losses at high field displacements. The transition between the two regimes occurs at field shifts proportional to the third power of the squeezing factor, indicating that squeezing greatly enhances the phase interval in which quantum effects are relevant in optimal phase estimations using photon resolving detectors. The case under study could thus be understood as a 'missing link' between genuine multiphoton interference and the straightforward suppression of noise usually associated with squeezed light.

Optical multi-mode systems provide large scale Hilbert spaces that can be accessed and controlled using single photon sources, linear optics and photon detection. Here, we consider the bipartite entanglement generated by coherently distributing M photons in M modes to two separate locations, where linear optics and photon detection is used to verify the non-classical correlations between the two M-mode systems. We show that the entangled state is symmetric under mode shift operations performed in the two systems and use this symmetry to derive correlations between photon number distributions detected after a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the modes. The experimentally observable correlations can be explained by a simple and intuitive rule that relates the sum of the output mode indices to the eigenvalue of the input state under the mode shift operation. Since the photon number operators after the DFT do not commute with the initial photon number operators, entanglement is necessary to achieve strong correlations in both the initial mode photon numbers and the photon numbers observed after the DFT. We can therefore derive entanglement witnesses based on the experimentally observable correlations in both photon number distributions, providing a practical criterion for the evaluation of large scale entanglement in optical multi-mode systems. Our method thus demonstrates how non-classical signatures in large scale optical quantum circuits can be accessed experimentally by choosing an appropriate combination of modes in which to detect the photon number distributions that characterize the quantum coherences of the state.

Quantum statistics is defined by Hilbert space products between the eigenstates associated with state preparation and measurement. The same Hilbert space products also describe the dynamics generated by a Hamiltonian when one of the states is an eigenstate of energy E and the other represents an observable B. In this paper, we investigate this relation between the observable time evolution of quantum systems and the coherence of Hilbert space products in detail. It is shown that the times of arrival for a specific value of B observed with states that have finite energy uncertainties can be used to derive the Hilbert space product between eigenstates of energy E and eigenstates of the dynamical variable B. Quantum phases and interference effects appear in the form of an action that relates energy to time in the experimentally observable dynamics of localized states. We illustrate the relation between quantum coherence and dynamics by applying our analysis to several examples from quantum optics, demonstrating the possibility of explaining non-classical statistics in terms of the energy-time relations that characterize the corresponding transformation dynamics of quantum systems.

We introduce a class of mixed multiqubit states, that corresponds to a randomized version of graph states. Such states arise when a graph state is prepared with noisy or imperfect controlled-Z gates. We study the entanglement features of these states by investigating both bipartite and genuine multipartite entanglement. Bipartite entanglement is studied via the concepts of connectedness and persistency, which are related to measurement based quantum computation. The presence of multipartite entanglement is instead revealed by the use of witness operators which are subsequently adapted to study nonlocal properties through the violation of suitable Bell inequalities. We also present results on the entanglement detection of particular randomized graph states, by deriving explicit thresholds for entanglement and nonlocality in terms of the noise parameter that characterizes the controlled-Z gates exploited for their generation. Finally, we propose a method to further improve the detection of genuine multipartite entanglement in this class of states.