Chaotic behaviour is ubiquitous and plays an important part in most fields of science. In classical physics, chaos is characterized by hypersensitivity of the time evolution of a system to initial conditions. Quantum mechanics does not permit a similar definition owing in part to the uncertainty principle, and in part to the Schrödinger equation, which preserves the overlap between quantum states. This fundamental disconnect poses a challenge to quantum-classical correspondence, and has motivated a long-standing search for quantum signatures of classical chaos. Here we present the experimental realization of a common paradigm for quantum chaos-the quantum kicked top- and the observation directly in quantum phase space of dynamics that have a chaotic classical counterpart. Our system is based on the combined electronic and nuclear spin of a single atom and is therefore deep in the quantum regime; nevertheless, we find good correspondence between the quantum dynamics and classical phase space structures. Because chaos is inherently a dynamical phenomenon, special significance attaches to dynamical signatures such as sensitivity to perturbation or the generation of entropy and entanglement, for which only indirect evidence has been available. We observe clear differences in the sensitivity to perturbation in chaotic versus regular, non-chaotic regimes, and present experimental evidence for dynamical entanglement as a signature of chaos.

We explore the dynamics of entanglement in classically chaotic systems by considering a multiqubit system that behaves collectively as a spin system obeying the dynamics of the quantum kicked top. In the classical limit, the kicked top exhibits both regular and chaotic dynamics depending on the strength of the chaoticity parameter in the Hamiltonian. We show that the entanglement of the multiqubit system, considered for both the bipartite and the pairwise entanglement, yields a signature of quantum chaos. Whereas bipartite entanglement is enhanced in the chaotic region, pairwise entanglement is suppressed. Furthermore, we define a timeaveraged entangling power and show that this entangling power changes markedly as moves the system from being predominantly regular to being predominantly chaotic, thus sharply identifying the edge of chaos. When this entangling power is averaged over all states, it yields a signature of global chaos. The qualitative behavior of this global entangling power is similar to that of the classical Lyapunov exponent.

We analyze the relationship between tripartite entanglement and genuine tripartite nonlocality for three-qubit pure states in the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger class. We consider a family of states known as the generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states and derive an analytical expression relating the three-tangle, which quantifies tripartite entanglement, to the Svetlichny inequality, which is a Bell-type inequality that is violated only when all three qubits are nonlocally correlated. We show that states with three-tangle less than 1/2 do not violate the Svetlichny inequality. On the other hand, a set of states known as the maximal slice states does violate the Svetlichny inequality, and exactly analogous to the two-qubit case, the amount of violation is directly related to the degree of tripartite entanglement. We discuss further interesting properties of the generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and maximal slice states.

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We investigate non-Gaussian states of light as ancillary inputs for generating nonlinear transformations required for quantum computing with continuous variables. We consider a recent proposal for preparing a cubic phase state, find the exact form of the prepared state and perform a detailed comparison to the ideal cubic phase state. We thereby identify the main challenges to preparing an ideal cubic phase state and describe the gates implemented with the non-ideal prepared state. We also find the general form of operations that can be implemented with ancilla Fock states, together with Gaussian input states, linear optics, squeezing transformations, and homodyne detection with feed forward, and discuss the feasibility of continuous variable quantum computing using ancilla Fock states.