Publications

Within the last two decades, Quantum Technologies (QT) have made tremendous progress, moving from Noble Prize award-winning experiments on quantum physics into a cross-disciplinary field of applied research. Technologies are being developed now that explicitly address individual quantum states and make use of the 'strange' quantum properties, such as superposition and entanglement. The field comprises four domains: Quantum Communication, Quantum Simulation, Quantum Computation, and Quantum Sensing and Metrology. One success factor for the rapid advancement of QT is a well-aligned global research community with a common understanding of the challenges and goals. In Europe, this community has profited from several coordination projects, which have orchestrated the creation of a 150-page QT Roadmap. This article presents an updated summary of this roadmap. Besides sections on the four domains of QT, we have included sections on Quantum Theory and Software, and on Quantum Control, as both are important areas of research that cut across all four domains. Each section, after a short introduction to the domain, gives an overview on its current status and main challenges and then describes the advances in science and technology foreseen for the next ten years and beyond.

Long-distance quantum communication through optical fibers is currently limited to a few hundreds of kilometres due to fiber losses. Quantum repeaters could extend this limit to continental distances. Most approaches to quantum repeaters require highly multimode quantum memories in order to reach high communication rates. The atomic frequency comb memory scheme can in principle achieve high temporal multimode storage, without sacrificing memory efficiency. However, previous demonstrations have been hampered by the difficulty of creating high-resolution atomic combs, which reduces the efficiency for multimode storage. In this article we present a comb preparation method that allows one to increase the multimode capacity for a fixed memory bandwidth. We apply the method to a $^{151}$Eu$^{3+}$-doped Y$_2$SiO$_5$ crystal, in which we demonstrate storage of 100 modes for 51 $\mu$s using the AFC echo scheme (a delay-line memory), and storage of 50 modes for 0.541 ms using the AFC spin-wave memory (an on-demand memory). We also briefly discuss the ultimate multimode limit imposed by the optical decoherence rate, for a fixed memory bandwidth.

Quantum Communication is the art of transferring an unknown quantum state from one location, Alice, to a distant one, Bob. This is a non-trivial task because of the quantum no-cloning theorem which prevents one from merely using only classical means.

A long distance quantum teleportation experiment with a fiber-delayed Bell state measurement (BSM) is reported. The source creating the qubits to be teleported and the source creating the necessary entangled state are connected to the beam splitter realizing the BSM by two 2 km long optical fibers. In addition, the teleported qubits are analyzed after 2.2 km of optical fiber, in another laboratory separated by 55 m. Time-bin qubits carried by photons at 1310 nm are teleported onto photons at 1550 nm. The fidelity is of 77%, above the maximal value obtainable without entanglement. This is the first realization of an elementary quantum relay over significant distances, which will allow an increase in the range of quantum communication and quantum key distribution.

We use hyper-entanglement to experimentally realize deterministic entanglement swapping based on quantum Elegant Joint Measurements. These are joint projections of two qubits onto highly symmetric, iso-entangled, bases. We report measurement fidelities no smaller than $97.4\%$. We showcase the applications of these measurements by using the entanglement swapping procedure to demonstrate quantum correlations in the form of proof-of-principle violations of both bilocal Bell inequalities and more stringent correlation criteria corresponding to full network nonlocality. Our results are a foray into entangled measurements and nonlocality beyond the paradigmatic Bell state measurement and they show the relevance of more general measurements in entanglement swapping scenarios.

We investigate network nonlocality in the triangle scenario when all three parties have no input and binary outputs. Through an explicit example, we prove that this minimal scenario supports nonlocal correlations compatible with no-signaling and independence of the three sources, but not with realisations based on independent quantum or classical sources. This nonlocality is robust to noise. Moreover, we identify the equivalent to a Popescu-Rohrlich box in the minimal triangle scenario.

No abstract is provided for this article.

A comparison of polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) measurements between the Jones matrix eigenanalysis and the interferometric technique is presented. A large range of PMD delays between 0.1 and 20 ps have been taken into account. The results show a very good agreement in the range up to 5 ps. The slope of a linear fit deviates <3 % from unity. Taking into account the values in the higher range up to 20 ps, a deviation of 13% from unity is obtained.

High-dimensional entanglement offers promising perspectives in quantum information science. In practice, however, the main challenge is to devise efficient methods to characterize high-dimensional entanglement, based on the available experimental data which is usually rather limited. Here we report the characterization and certification of high-dimensional entanglement in photon pairs, encoded in temporal modes. Building upon recently developed theoretical methods, we certify an entanglement of formation of 2.09(7) ebits in a time-bin implementation, and 4.1(1) ebits in an energy-time implementation. These results are based on very limited sets of local measurements, which illustrates the practical relevance of these methods.

We discuss a device capable of filtering out two-mode states of light with mode populations differing by more than a certain threshold, while not revealing which mode is more populated. It would allow engineering of quantum states of light in a way which is preserving specific superpositions. As a result, it would enhance optical phase estimation with these states as well as distinguishability of macroscopic qubits. We propose an optical scheme, which is a relatively simple, albeit non-ideal, operational implementation of such a filter. It uses tapping of the original polarization two-mode field, with a polarization neutral beam splitter of low reflectivity. Next, the reflected beams are suitably interfered on a polarizing beam splitter. It is oriented such that it selects unbiased polarization modes with respect to the original ones. The more an incoming two-mode Fock state is unequally populated, the more the polarizing beam splitter output modes are equally populated. This effect is especially pronounced for highly populated states. Additionally, for such states we expect strong population correlations between the original fields and the tapped one. Thus, after a photon-number measurement of the polarizing beam splitter outputs, a feed-forward loop can be used to let through a shutter the field, which was transmitted by the tapping beam splitter. This happens only if the counts at the outputs are roughly equal. In such a case, the transmitted field differs strongly in occupation number of the two modes, while information on which mode is more populated is non-existent (a necessary condition for preserving superpositions).

We design a universal quantum homogenizer, which is a quantum machine that takes as an input a system qubit initially in the state $ρ$ and a set of N reservoir qubits initially prepared in the same state $ξ$. In the homogenizer the system qubit sequentially interacts with the reservoir qubits via the partial swap transformation. The homogenizer realizes, in the limit sense, the transformation such that at the output each qubit is in an arbitratily small neighbourhood of the state $ξ$ irrespective of the initial states of the system and the reservoir qubits. This means that the system qubit undergoes an evolution that has a fixed point, which is the reservoir state $ξ$. We also study approximate homogenization when the reservoir is composed of a finite set of identically prepared qubits. The homogenizer allows us to understand various aspects of the dynamics of open systems interacting with environments in non-equilibrium states. In particular, the reversibility vs or irreversibility of the dynamics of the open system is directly linked to specific (classical) information about the order in which the reservoir qubits interacted with the system qubit. This aspect of the homogenizer leads to a model of a quantum safe with a classical combination.We analyze in detail how entanglement between the reservoir and the system is created during the process of quantum homogenization. We show that the information about the initial state of the system qubit is stored in the entanglement between the homogenized qubits.

Networks composed of independent sources of entangled particles that connect distant users are a rapidly developing quantum technology and an increasingly promising test-bed for fundamental physics. Here we address the certification of their post-classical properties through demonstrations of full network nonlocality. Full network nonlocality goes beyond standard nonlocality in networks by falsifying any model in which at least one source is classical, even if all the other sources are limited only by the no-signaling principle. We report on the observation of full network nonlocality in a star-shaped network featuring three independent sources of photonic qubits and joint three-qubit entanglement-swapping measurements. Our results constitute the first experimental demonstration of full network nonlocality beyond the bilocal network.

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.