Xiongfeng Ma

Tsinghua University | TH · Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences

Group twirling is crucial in quantum information processing, particularly in randomized benchmarking and randomized compiling. While protocols based on Pauli twirling have been effectively crafted to transform arbitrary noise channels into Pauli channels for Clifford gates—thereby facilitating efficient benchmarking and mitigating worst-case errors...

Quantum key distribution is a cornerstone of quantum cryptography, enabling secure communication through the principles of quantum mechanics. In reality, most practical implementations rely on the decoy-state method to ensure security against photon-number-splitting attacks. A significant challenge in realistic quantum cryptosystems arises from sta...

The accurate and robust estimation of quantum process properties is crucial for quantum information processing and many-body physics. Combining classical shadow tomography and randomized benchmarking, Helsen et al. introduced a method to estimate the linear properties of quantum processes. In this work, we focus on the estimation protocols of nonli...

Nonlocality, evidenced by the violation of Bell inequalities, not only signifies entanglement but also highlights measurement incompatibility in quantum systems. Utilizing the generalized Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality, our high-efficiency optical setup achieves a loophole-free violation of $2.0132$. This result provides a device...

Quantum learning tasks often leverage randomly sampled quantum circuits to characterize unknown systems. An efficient approach known as "circuit reusing," where each circuit is executed multiple times, reduces the cost compared to implementing new circuits. This work investigates the optimal reusing parameter that minimizes the variance of measurem...

Nonlocality, manifested by the violation of Bell inequalities, indicates entanglement within a joint quantum system. A natural question is how much entanglement is required for a given nonlocal behavior. Here, we explore this question by quantifying entanglement using a family of generalized Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt-type Bell inequalities. Given...

Quantum key distribution is a cornerstone of quantum technology, offering information-theoretical secure keys for remote parties. With many quantum communication networks established globally, the mode-pairing protocol stands out for its efficacy over inter-city distances using simple setups, emerging as a promising solution. In this study, we empl...

Entanglement and coherence are fundamental properties of quantum systems, promising to power near-future quantum technologies, such as quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum metrology. Yet, their quantification, rather than mere detection, generally requires reconstructing the spectrum of quantum states, i.e., experimentally challe...

Quantum randomness usually relies heavily on the accurate characterization of the generator implementation, where the device imperfection or inaccurate characterization can lead to incorrect entropy estimation and practical bias, significantly affecting the reliability of the generated randomness. Measurement-device-independent (MDI) quantum random...

In quantum networks, residual states remaining after information processing can be valuable resources. Efficiently recycling these states to extract resources such as genuine multipartite entanglement and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs is essential for optimizing network performance. Our work demonstrates a tripartite entanglement distillation schem...

Quantum key distribution has emerged as a promising solution for constructing secure communication networks, with its information‐theoretic security rooted in quantum mechanics. One of the recent quantum key distribution protocols, the phase‐matching protocol, can have a quadratic key‐rate improvement. Its security was initially established using a...

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of a statement without leaking any further information. As an efficient variant of ZKP, noninteractive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) adopting the Fiat–Shamir heuristic is essential to a wide spectrum of applications, such a...

Complementarity is an essential feature of quantum mechanics. The preparation of an eigenstate of one observable implies complete randomness in its complementary observable. In quantum cryptography, complementarity allows us to formulate security analyses in terms of phase-error correction. However, the concept becomes much subtler in the device-in...

Ultracold atoms in optical lattices form a competitive candidate for quantum computation owing to the excellent coherence properties, the highly parallel operations over spins, and the ultralow entropy achieved in qubit arrays. For this, a massive number of parallel entangled atom pairs have been realized in superlattices. However, the more formida...

Quantum mechanics features a variety of distinct properties such as coherence and entanglement, which could be explored to showcase potential advantages over classical counterparts in information processing. In general, legitimate quantum operations must adhere to principles of quantum mechanics, particularly the requirements of complete positivity...

Entanglement and coherence are fundamental properties of quantum systems, promising to power the near future quantum technologies. Yet, their quantification, rather than mere detection, generally requires reconstructing the spectrum of quantum states, i.e., experimentally challenging measurement sets that increase exponentially with the system size...

Quantum measurements can produce unpredictable randomness arising from the uncertainty principle. When measuring a state with von Neumann measurements, the intrinsic randomness can be quantified by the quantum coherence of the state on the measurement basis. Unlike projection measurements, there are additional and possibly hidden degrees of freedom...

In the past two decades, quantum key distribution networks based on telecom fibers have been implemented on metropolitan and intercity scales. One of the bottlenecks lies in the exponential decay of the key rate with respect to the transmission distance. Recently proposed schemes mainly focus on achieving longer distances by creating a long-arm sin...

Multipartite entanglement plays an essential role in both quantum information science and many-body physics. Because of the exponentially large dimension and complex geometric structure of the state space, the detection of entanglement in many-body systems is extremely challenging in reality. Conventional means, like entanglement witness and entrop...

Entanglement detection is essential in quantum information science and quantum many-body physics. It has been proved that entanglement exists almost surely for a random quantum state, while the realizations of effective entanglement criteria usually consume exponentially many resources with regard to system size or qubit number, and efficient crite...

The unpredictable process of state collapse caused by quantum measurements makes the generation of quantum randomness possible. In this paper, we explore the quantitive connection between the randomness generation and the state collapse and provide a randomness verification protocol under the assumptions: (I) independence between the source and the...

With the development of controllable quantum systems, fast and practical characterization of multi-qubit gates has become essential for building high-fidelity quantum computing devices. The usual way to fulfill this requirement via randomized benchmarking demands complicated implementation of numerous multi-qubit twirling gates. How to efficiently...

Quantum information science provides powerful technologies beyond the scope of classical physics. In practice, accurate control of quantum operations is a challenging task with current quantum devices. The implementation of high fidelity and multi-qubit quantum operations consumes massive resources and requires complicated hardware design to fight...

Featuring excellent coherence and operated parallelly, ultracold atoms in optical lattices form a competitive candidate for quantum computation. For this, a massive number of parallel entangled atom pairs have been realized in superlattices. However, the more formidable challenge is to scale-up and detect multipartite entanglement due to the lack o...

To achieve scalable quantum information processing, great efforts have been devoted to the creation of large-scale entangled states in various physical systems. Ultracold atom in optical lattice is considered as one of the promising platforms due to its feasible initialization and parallel manipulation. In this work, we propose an efficient scheme...

To achieve scalable quantum information processing, great efforts have been devoted to the creation of large-scale entangled states in various physical systems. Ultracold atom in optical lattice is considered as one of the promising platforms due to its feasible initialization and parallel manipulation. In this work, we propose an efficient scheme...

In the past two decades, quantum key distribution networks based on telecom fibers have been implemented on metropolitan and intercity scales. One of the bottlenecks lies in the exponential decay of the key rate with respect to the transmission distance. Recently proposed schemes mainly focus on achieving longer distances by creating a long-arm sin...

Entanglement detection is essential in quantum information science and quantum many-body physics. It has been proved that entanglement exists almost surely for a random quantum state, while the realizations of effective entanglement criteria usually consume exponential resources, and efficient criteria often perform poorly without prior knowledge....

Quantum key distribution — the establishment of information-theoretically secure keys based on quantum physics — is mainly limited by its practical performance, which is characterised by the dependence of the key rate on the channel transmittance R(η). Recently, schemes based on single-photon interference have been proposed to improve the key rate...

Privacy amplification is the key step to guarantee the security of quantum communication. The existing security proofs require the accumulation of a large number of raw key bits for privacy amplification. This is similar to block ciphers in classical cryptography that would delay the final key generation since an entire block must be accumulated ah...

Quantum information science provides powerful technologies beyond the scope of classical physics. In practice, accurate control of quantum operations is a challenging task with current quantum devices. The implementation of high fidelity and multi-qubit quantum operations consumes massive resources and requires complicated hardware design to fight...

With the development of controllable quantum systems, fast and practical characterization for multi-qubit gates is essential for building high-fidelity quantum computing devices. The usual way to fulfill this requirement via randomized benchmarking asks for complicated implementation of numerous multi-qubit twirling gates. How to efficiently and re...

Quantum measurements can produce randomness arising from the uncertainty principle. When measuring a state with von Neumann measurements, the intrinsic randomness can be quantified by the quantum coherence of the state on the measurement basis. Unlike projection measurements, there are additional and possibly hidden degrees of freedom in apparatus...

Multipartite entanglement plays an essential role in both quantum information science and many-body physics. Due to the exponentially large dimension and complex geometric structure of the state space, the detection of entanglement in many-body systems is extremely challenging in reality. Conventional means, like entanglement witness and entropy cr...

Quantum key distribution -- the establishment of information-theoretically secure keys based on quantum physics -- is mainly limited by its practical performance, which is characterised by the dependence of the key rate on the channel transmittance $R(\eta)$. Recently, schemes based on single-photon interference have been proposed to improve the ke...

As an extension of quantum key distribution, secure communication among multiple users is a basic task in a quantum network. When the quantum network structure becomes complicated with a large number of users, it is important to investigate network issues, including security, key management, latency, reliability, scalability, and cost. In this work...

Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables secure key exchanges between two remote users. The ultimate goal of secure communication is to establish a global quantum network. The existing field tests suggest that quantum networks are feasible. To achieve a practical quantum network, we need to overcome several challenges including realizing versatile to...

Complementarity is an essential feature of quantum mechanics. Two observables are complementary to each other if the preparation of an eigenstate of one observable implies complete randomness in the second observable. In quantum cryptography, complementarity allows us to formulate security analyses in terms of phase-error correction. However, in th...

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of a statement without leaking any further information. As an efficient variant of ZKP, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) adopting the Fiat-Shamir heuristic is essential to a wide spectrum of applications, such...

Privacy amplification is the key step to guarantee the security of quantum communication. The existing security proofs require accumulating a large number of raw key bits for privacy amplification. This is similar to block ciphers in classical cryptography that would delay the final key generation since an entire block must be accumulated before pr...

The recently proposed phase-matching quantum key distribution offers means to overcome the linear key rate-transmittance bound. Since the key information is encoded onto the phases of coherent states, the misalignment between the two remote reference frames would yield errors and significantly degrade the key generation rate from the ideal case. In...

Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables secure key exchanges between two remote users. The ultimate goal of secure communication is to establish a global quantum network. The existing field tests suggest that quantum networks are feasible. To achieve a practical quantum network, we need to overcome several challenges, including realising versatile t...

The recently proposed phase-matching quantum key distribution offers means to overcome the linear key rate–transmittance bound. Since the key information is encoded onto the phases of coherent states, the misalignment between the two remote reference frames would yield errors and significantly degrade the key generation rate from the ideal case. In...

The generation and verification of large-scale entanglement are essential to the development of quantum technologies. In this paper, we present an efficient scheme to generate genuine multipartite entanglement of a large number of qubits by using the Heisenberg interaction. This method can be conveniently implemented in various physical platforms,...

Randomness expansion where one generates a longer sequence of random numbers from a short one is viable in quantum mechanics but not allowed classically. Device-independent quantum randomness expansion provides a randomness resource of the highest security level. Here, we report the first experimental realization of device-independent quantum rando...

Quantum error correction is an essential ingredient for universal quantum computing. Despite tremendous experimental efforts in the study of quantum error correction, to date, there has been no demonstration in the realisation of universal quantum error correcting code, with the subsequent verification of all key features including the identificati...

The entropy or randomness source is an essential ingredient in random number generation. Quantum random number generators generally require well modeled and calibrated light sources, such as a laser, to generate randomness. With uncharacterized light sources, such as sunlight or an uncharacterized laser, genuine randomness is practically hard to be...

Quantum network is undergoing exciting develop-ments. To address the practical issues in it, we design new key management algorithms, and a routing scheme with delayed privacy ampli ication to reduce the trustworthiness requirement on relays.

The generation and verification of large-scale entanglement are essential to the development of quantum technologies. In this work, we present an efficient scheme to generate genuine multipartite entanglement of a large number of qubits, by using the Heisenberg $XY$ interaction. This method can be conveniently implemented in various physical platfo...

Quantum random number generation is a technique to generate random numbers by extracting randomness from specific quantum processes. As for practical random number generators, they are required not only to have no information leakage but also have a high speed at generating random sequences. In this paper, we consider the generators based on laser...

Quantum cryptographic conferencing (QCC) holds promise for distributing information-theoretic secure keys among multiple users over a long distance. Limited by the fragility of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, QCC networks based on directly distributing GHZ states over a long distance still face a big challenge. Another two potential appro...

Quantum key distribution (QKD)1,2 offers a long-term solution to secure key exchange. Due to photon loss in transmission, it was believed that the repeaterless key rate is bounded by a linear function of the transmittance, O(η) (refs. 3,4), limiting the maximal secure transmission distance5,6. Recently, a novel type of QKD scheme has been shown to...

Quantum cryptographic conferencing (QCC) holds promise for distributing information-theoretic secure keys among multiple users over long distance. Limited by the fragility of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, QCC networks based on directly distributing GHZ states at long distance still face big challenge. Another two potential approaches are...

There are two main factors limiting the performance of quantum key distribution—channel transmission loss and noise. Previously, a linear bound was believed to put an upper limit on the rate-transmittance performance. Remarkably, the recently proposed twin-field and phase-matching quantum key distribution schemes have been proven to overcome the li...

In principle, quantum key distribution (QKD) offers information-theoretic security based on the laws of physics. In practice, however, the imperfections of realistic devices might introduce deviations from the idealized models used in security analyses. Can quantum code breakers successfully hack real systems by exploiting the side channels? Can qu...

Maximally bipartite entangled state |Ψ+〉, also known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair, is the unit resource of entanglement and the key for quantum information processing. An important problem is that how many maximally bipartite entangled states could be distilled from a multipartite entangled state shared among a quantum network. Here, we focu...

The output randomness from a random number generator can be certified by observing the violation of quantum contextuality inequalities based on the Kochen-Specker theorem. Contextuality can be tested in a single quantum system, which significantly simplifies the experimental requirements to observe the violation comparing to the ones based on nonlo...

Recently, there are tremendous developments on the number of controllable qubits in several quantum computing systems. For these implementations, it is crucial to determine the entanglement structure of the prepared multipartite quantum state as a basis for further information processing tasks. In reality, evaluation of a multipartite state is in g...

The entropy or randomness source is an essential ingredient in random number generation. Quantum random number generators generally require well modeled and calibrated light sources, such as a laser, to generate randomness. With uncharacterized light sources, such as sunlight or an uncharacterized laser, genuine randomness is practically hard to be...

There are two main factors limiting the performance of quantum key distribution --- channel transmission loss and noise. Previously, a linear bound was believed to put an upper limit on the rate-transmittance performance. Remarkably, the recently proposed twin-field and phase-matching quantum key distribution schemes have been proven to overcome th...

Coherence is a fundamental resource in quantum information processing, which can be certified by a coherence witness. Due to the imperfection of measurement devices, a conventional coherence witness may lead to fallacious results. We show that the conventional witness could mistake an incoherent state as a state with coherence due to the inaccurate...

The peculiar uncertainty or randomness of quantum measurements stems from quantum coherence, whose information‐theoretic characterization is currently under investigation. The resource theory of coherence investigates interpretations of coherence measures and the interplay with other quantum properties, such as quantum correlations and intrinsic ra...

Coherence is a fundamental resource in quantum information processing, which can be certified by a coherence witness. Due to the imperfection of measurement devices, a conventional coherence witness may lead to fallacious results. We show that the conventional witness could mistake an incoherent state as a state with coherence due to the inaccurate...

Quantum key distribution (QKD offers a long-term solution to establish information-theoretically secure keys between two distant users. In practice, with a careful characterization of quantum sources and the decoy-state method, measure-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides secure key distribution. While short-distance fibre...

Quantum key distribution allows secure key distribution between remote communication parties. In a quantum network, multiple users are connected by quantum links for key distribution and classical links for encrypted data transmission. When the quantum network structure becomes complicated with a large number of users, it is important to investigat...

Quantum error correction is an essential ingredient for universal quantum computing. Despite tremendous experimental efforts in the study of quantum error correction, to date, there has been no demonstration in the realisation of universal quantum error correction code (QECC), with the subsequent verification of all key features including the ident...

Quantum coherence was recently formalized as a physical resource to measure the strength of superposition. Based on the resource theory, we present a systematic framework that connects a coherence measure to the security of quantum key distribution. By considering a generic entanglement-based key distribution protocol under the collective attack sc...

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.029901

Entanglement is a key resource for quantum information processing. A widely used tool for detecting entanglement is the entanglement witness, where the measurement of the witness operator is guaranteed to be positive for all separable states and can be negative for certain entangled states. In reality, due to exponentially increasing the Hilbert-sp...

Production and verification of multipartite quantum state are an essential step in quantum information processing. In this work, we propose an efficient method to decompose symmetric multipartite observables, which are invariant under permutations between parties, with only (N+1)(N+2)/2 local measurement settings, where N is the number of qubits. W...