Generating Entanglement With Linear Optics
Generating Entanglement With Linear Optics
n MA = MB Fock state V B 2
TABLE I. Entanglement bounds proven in this paper. The notation is as defined in Section II (see Figure 1).
the other hand, looking at the case of at most a single U(M ). The top MI input modes contain n input pho-
photon per input mode (as in, for example, boson sam- tons, while the bottom MV modes are ancilla vacua. The
pling [15]), a single mode Alice and no measurement, the representation of U carried by the n photon, M mode
entanglement is bounded above by 2 ebits regardless of Hilbert space in the number state (Fock) basis is de-
how many photons are present. If we also restrict Bob noted U (n) . The top MA output modes belong to one
to a single mode and furnish the remaining modes with party, Alice, the middle MB modes belong to Bob, and
number resolving detectors, the expected entanglement the bottom MH modes – Harold – get measured using
is bounded by log 3 ebits. We then find provable uni- photon counting detectors. Harold’s detection pattern is
versal bounds on the mode entanglement stemming from labelled h = (nMS +1 , · · · , nM ) where ni gives the pho-
the dimensionality of the bipartite Fock states involved, ton number of output mode i, and MS = MA + MB is
and from the linearity of the optical transformation. Fi- the number of modes in the “system”, i.e. modes that
nally, we conjecture a third bound due to unitarity which do not belong to Harold and are therefore unmeasured.
PM
extends the previously mentioned constant bound in the If nH = k=MS+1 nk = ||h||1 total photons have been
case of Alice having a single mode to multi-mode Alice, detected, the number of photons left in the system is
and we provide numerical evidence for this conjecture. nS = n − nH = nA + nB . The Hilbert space of subsys-
The maximum mode entanglement is summarized in Ta- tem X (a subset of modes), given that it contains exactly
ble I. nX photons, is denoted HX nX
.
Let the input to the interferometer be a Fock state
II. BACKGROUND |ψin i = |n1 , n2 , · · · , nMI , 0, · · · , 0i (1)
| {z }
MV
MI
n1 Y (â†k )nk
= √ |vaci , (2)
... nk !
k=1
MI MI
Y 1 (n) † (n) † nk (n)
...
U
MI M
Y 1 X †
= √ âj Ujk |vaci , (4)
n !
...
k=1 k j=1
MV
MH where Ujk are the matrix elements of the mode trans-
...
state consisting of nS = n − nH photons remaining in the relevant coefficients in particle notation by γ, which are
system modes 1, · · · , MS , given by related to the above mentioned permanent as
Cea,b (h, U )
hh|U (n) |ψin i γ1···1···M ···M (h, U ) = p . (11)
|ψS (h, U )i = . (5) n1 !...nMS !
k hh|U (n) |ψin i k
These are the coefficients of the output states as ex-
Note that this is a pure state on the system S = AB, pressed in terms of the creation operators assuming un-
because |hi only has support on subsystem H. We bunched input to the interferometer, see Eq.(12).
will denote the unnormalized output by |ψeS (h, U )i = Equation (9) provides a Schmidt decomposition we can
hh|U (n) |ψin i. The Hilbert space of the system is use to compute the entanglement. However, the fact
nS
that the total number of photons in the system, nS , is
HSnS =
M
nA
HA nB
⊗ HB , (6) preserved implies that not all conceivable bipartite basis
states |aiA ⊗ |biB are available, so the system should not
nA =0
simply be viewed as the tensor product of two qudits i.e.
where nB = nS − nA is the number of photons in Bob’s Eq.(8) is not simply the product of dimHA and dimHB .
subsystem. We are interested in entanglement with re- In particular, this means that states that are maximally
spect to this tensor product structure. The dimension of entangled in the usual sense do not exist. For example,
the Hilbert space of n photons in M modes is M +n−1 Alice can have many states with nS photons, but there
n ,
and so is only one possible Bob state to which they can be cor-
related, namely the vacuum (see Section V B 1).
nS
The entanglement measure that will be used is the von
X MA + n A − 1 MB + n B − 1
dim HSnS = (7) Neumann entropy; given a pure state |ψS (h, U )i, its den-
nA =0
nA nB
sity matrix is defined ρAB (h, U ) = |ψS (h, U )i hψS (h, U )|,
MS + n S − 1 and its reduced density matrices on subsystems
= (8)
nS are the marginals ρA (h, U ) = TrB [ρAB (h, U )] and
ρB (h, U ) = TrA [ρAB (h, U )]. The von Neumann entropy
as MS = MA + MB and nS = nA + nB . The totality of then S(ρA (h, U )) = − Tr[ρA (h, U ) · log ρA (h, U )] =
is P
states L
available to Alice can be thought of as the Hilbert − a λa · log λa where {λa }a are the non-zero eigenval-
nS nA
space nA =0 HA , and we may index its Fock basis as ues of the reduced state. Unless stated otherwise, loga-
{|aiA : a = (n1 , n2 , · · · , nMA ), ||a||1 = nA }. Similarly rithms will be assumed to be base 2. Finally, we will use
for Bob. Expanding the output in this basis, we have ebits as the unit of bipartite entanglement where 1 ebit
X corresponds to the von Neumann entropy of a Bell state.
|ψeS (h, U )i = Cea,b (h, U ) |ai ⊗ |bi .
A B (9)
a,b
III. QUBIT ENTANGLEMENT
The coefficients C e are related to permanents of the ma-
trix U [15, 16]. More specifically, consider an input In this section we will be considering the dual-rail en-
Fock state |ψi = |n1 · · · nM i and an output Fock state coding of two qubits. This means that MA = MB = 2
|φi = |n01 · · · n0M i both with a total number of n photons. and states are postselected so that subsystems A and B
Construct a new matrix Uψφ from U in two steps. First, have exactly one photon each, nA = nB = 1; all the
define the matrix Uψ consisting of nj copies of the j-th other states are discarded. (In general, the k-th qubit
column of U for all j ∈ {1, · · · , M }. Next, construct the consists of the modes 2k − 1 and 2k via the mapping
matrix Uψφ by using n0j copies of the j-th row of Uψ for |10i2k−1,2k → |0ik , |01i2k−1,2k → |1ik .) Despite the full
all j ∈ {1, · · · , M }. Then Hilbert space of the system being of dimension 10 (see
Eq. (13) ), these constraints limit the space of permissi-
perm(Uψφ ) ble states to dim HA = dim HB = 2, encoding two qubits.
hφ| U (n) |ψi = p . (10)
n1 ! · · · nM !n01 ! · · · n0M ! To entangle photons in this encoding using only passive
linear optics, the use of ancillas and postselection is nec-
In our notation, |ψi = |ψin i and |φi = |abhi, we therefore essary [4], so MH > 0.
have C ea,b (h, U ) = habh| U (n) |ψin i. The probability of
detecting pattern h is P (h, U ) = a,b |C
P ea,b (h, U )|2 , and
p A. Generating Bell states with three photons is
defining Ca,b = C ea,b / P (h, U ), the normalized state can impossible
P
be written as |ψS (h, U )i = a,b Ca,b (h, U ) |aiA |biB .
For future convenience we define coefficients of the It is known that generating a Bell state in dual-rail en-
output states in particle notation, where the Fock state coding with just two photons is impossible [4, 17]. Here
|n1 · · · nM i is written as |1| ·{z
· · 1} · · · M
| ·{z
· · M}i. We denote we prove that not only is it impossible with three pho-
n1 nM tons, it is only possible to create product states.
4
Ui3 , U3i would not appear in Eqs. (12), serving only to found that raising the overlap to the exponent 10 op-
make the constraints harder to satisfy. timized the numerical efficacy, penalizing states far from
a Bell state heavily. Multiplying by the probability of
detection gives
P the targetPcost function to be minimized,
6
Corollary III.2. In a passive linear optical setup using f (h, U ) = − h P (h, U ) k=1 | hBk |ψ(h, U )i |10 .
dual-rail encoding, ancillas and postselection, it is not
possible to create a Bell state using 3 photon input∗ .
MA = 2
MI
MB = 2
U
MV MH
FIG. 4. Results of optimization looking for interferometers
that generate Bell states with highest probability. The mini-
mum found of ≈ −0.1875 is exactly bounded by the values of
cost function for the known UBell interferometer as described
FIG. 3. The setup used in Section III B with four photons
in the text. Out of 50, 000 test runs, 1.2 % of minima found
in eight modes; MI = n = 4, MV = 4, MA = MB = 2,
were within 0.0001 of the minimum corresponding to UBell .
MH = 4. We give extensive numerical evidence for optimal
Besides the trials depicted in this graph, the cost function
Bell state generation using this setup when looking for specific
was also optimized with other parameters given to the op-
Bell states as output.
timizing algorithm as well as over the space of orthogonal
matrices. Thus the number of test runs for which a better
The previous section showed that Bell state generation solution could not be found is close to 100, 000.
with non-zero success probability requires at least four
photons. Two schemes which accomplish this task using Figure 4 shows the results of this minimization. The
four photons use six [10] and eight [12, 13] modes, with optimal known scheme, when evaluated for this cost
success probabilities of 2/27 and 1/4 respectively. function, gives a value of approximately −0.1875. It
We performed a numerical search for a linear optical produces one of these 6 Bell states with probability 1/32
Bell state generator that gives a higher success probabil- for 6 out of the 10 possible measurement patterns [13].
ity. We used a gradient descent based optimization al- We can see from the figure that the minimum achieved
gorithm over M = 8 unitaries with n = 4 photon input. by the numerical optimization over 50, 000 trials is also
Numerical optimization was carried out in Python, using approximately −0.1875, thus giving solutions which
the BFGS algorithm from the SciPy library [18]. This are equivalent to the known scheme in terms of this
algorithm finds local minima so it needs to be run many parameter. While not a proof, this numerical evidence
times with different seed unitaries, which were randomly strongly suggests that the known scheme is optimal
selected according to the Haar measure. for generating the above set of Bell states. Other
The cost function we consider is based on the overlap cost functions were also attempted, as well as other
with the desired Bell states. We allow for six different optimization libraries, but all gave the same results as
Bell states, which in the Fock basis after √ measurement the technique above.
correspond to |B1,2
√ i = (|1010i ± |0101i)/ 2, |B3,4 i√=
(|1001i ± |0110i)/ 2 and |B5,6 i = (|1100i ± |0011i)/ 2, We also investigated the case of non-orthogonal Bell
where the latter can be corrected to the usual dual-rail states; for example, allowing |00i + |11i as well as
qubit encoding using a switch [13]. After detecting mea- |00i + i |11i as target states. The possibility of both
surement pattern h, the overlap between each of these of these states being generated from the same U for
states with the post-selected state is calculated. We different measurement patterns was explored by running
similar numerical optimizations rewarding such situa-
tions. We found no such unitary, which is an interesting
result in itself.
∗ Kieling observed this using an algebraic geometry approach to
the problem [17]; here we offer an explicit proof applicable to any Though the complexity of the problem grows quickly,
entangled state. we also looked at how the situation changes with higher
6
numbers of input photons and modes. We numerically maximum we can achieve in dual-rail qubit encoding.
optimized over n = 5, M = 10 using a similar algorithm Adding input photons for the same M increases the
and no improved solutions were found over 5000 runs. average entanglement, while adding vacuum ancillas
Similarly, we checked n = 6, M = 12 over 1000 runs and decreases it. We see that the average entanglement of
here as well there was no improvement over the −0.1875 n + 1 photons in M + 1 modes can be lower than that
result for n = 4, M = 8. for M and n (see n = M = 5 and 6). That is, we
do not expect more average entanglement by adding a
photon at the cost of adding another mode. Further, we
IV. RANDOM UNITARIES note that even with 2 photons, there is more average
entanglement generated than in the optimal Bell state
In this section, we move from the dual-rail qubit en- generator with 4 photons. We explore this in more detail
coding of Section III to mode entanglement in Section V. for a better comparison.
First, we look at how much mode entanglement can be
generated with random elements of the unitary group,
which we can then use to compare with the dual-rail en-
coding. We do so by setting Alice and Bob’s number
of modes to 2, and numerically computing the average
amount of entanglement over measurement patterns. No-
tice that this is different from the setting in Section III,
where we aimed to get a maximally entangled Bell state
with the highest possible probability. Here and in the
rest of this work we will study this average entanglement,
namely
X
hS(U )iH = P (h, U )S(ρA (h, U )). (18)
h
Thus we see that the entanglement bound is O(log n), In the following calculations we shall assume that n →
where n is the number of photons. The constant prefac- ∞ as any bound on the entropy found for this infinite
tor is maximized for p = |c|2 = |d|2 = 1/2, whence the en- case would also hold for a finite one with the same set of
tropy of Alice’s state is 1/2 log2 (2πen · 1/2 · (1 − 1/2)) + constraints.
O(1/n) = 1/2 log2 (πen/2)+O(1/n). Finally, notice that
solutions to Equation (22) where |c|2 = |d|2 = 1/2 are a Lemma V.3. Let {pj }∞ P be a probability distribution
j=0
family of balanced beamsplitters. subject to the constraint j jpj ≤ N . Then the entropy
This is in stark contrast to the situation where the of this distribution is at most log (1 + N )1+N /N N .
input is unbunched, where we will see in the next section
Proof. The entropy P∞ of the probability distribution
that the entanglement is bounded by a constant.
{pj }∞
j=0 is S = − log pj . We maximize this
j=0 pj P
∞
subject to the constraints j=0 jpj = n ≤ N and
P∞
2. Entanglement for unbunched input is bounded j=0 p j = 1 using the method of Lagrange multipliers.
Let the Lagrangian be
We now consider situations where Alice only has one
∞ ∞
mode, Bob can have many, and we do not use any mea- X X
surement. The following Lemma will be of use. L = S + (λ0 + log e) pj − 1 + λ1 jpj − n .
j=0 j=0
(27)
MA = 1 Then ∂L/∂pj = − log pj + λ0 + λ1 j. Setting ∂L/∂pj = 0
... ...
MB
∞
MV X
jpj = 2λ0 2λ1 /(1 − 2λ1 )2 = n (28)
j=0
∞
FIG. 8. The setup used in Section V A 2. The input is an
X
pj = 2λ0 /(1 − 2λ1 ) = 1 (29)
unbunched state with MI = n, with MV ≥ 0, MA = 1, MB ≥
j=0
1 and MH = 0. We prove that entanglement for this setup is
bounded by a constant. This allows us to solve for λ0 and λ1 , giving
= −λ0 − λ1 n
Proof. Let |ni be an arbitrary Fock state.
1+n
= log (1 + n) /nn (31)
†
hn̂j i = hn| U (n) n̂j U (n) |ni
† † The function above increases monotonically for n ≥ 0
= hn| U (n) â†j U (n) U (n) âj U (n) |ni and since n ≤ N we get
S ≤ log (1 + N )1+N /N N .
(32)
X † X
= hn| âj 0 Ujj 0 âj 00 Ujj 00 |ni
j0 j 00
Ujj 0 Ujj 00 hn| â†j 0 âj 00 |ni
XX
=
j0 j 00
Corollary V.4. Let {pj }∞ j=0 bePsome probability distri-
X bution subject to the constraint j jpj ≤ N , N ∈ [0, 1].
= Ujj 0 Ujj 0 nj 0 (25) Then the entropy of this distribution is at most 2 ebits.
j0
Theorem V.5. Let Alice have one output mode, MA =
If, as hypothesized, nj ≤ N for all modes j, then 1, and Bob have MB = k. Let the input be a single
photon in each of the k+1 modes. Then the entanglement
X X between Alice and Bob is bounded by 2 ebits for all k.
hn̂j i = |Uj 0 j |2 nj 0 ≤ |Uj 0 j |2 N = N. (26)
j0 j0 Proof. Alice’s reduced density matrix is diagonal in
the Fock basis, where each entry hj| ρA |ji corresponds
to the probability that Alice’s mode contains j photons.
9
...
1. We see that despite the fact that the dimension of M −1
Alice’s Hilbert space grows with the number of photons
as n + 1, and Bob’s can be even larger, the maximum M
entanglement is severely constrained to be less than 2
ebits. FIG. 9. The setup used in Section V A 3, where M = n,
Because we are interested in the average entanglement, MA = MB = 1, and MH ≥ 1. An arbitrary M mode in-
the result will hold for heralding as well: terferometer can be decomposed into M (M + 1)/2 two-mode
interferometers [21, 22]. Note that this also applies to an ar-
Corollary V.6. Let Alice have one output mode, MA = bitrary M − 1 mode sub-interferometer (blue). By focusing
1, while Bob and Harold have MB + MH = k. Let the on the only component that entangles Alice and Bob (red),
input be a single photon in each of the k + 1 modes. Then we show that the maximum entanglement is the M = n = 2
value of log 3 ebits.
the entanglement between Alice and Bob is bounded by 2
ebits for all k.
Pn
Proof. No LOCC operation can increase the amount of j=0 pj log (j + 2) is bounded by log 3 which can be
entanglement Pin the system on average [20]. Therefore, achieved by p1 = 1 and pk = 0 for k ∈ {0, 2, 3, . . . , n}.
hS(U )iH = h P (h, U )S(ρA (h, U )) ≤ S(ρA (U )), where
ρA (U ) is Alice’s reduced density matrix before any mea-
Proof. Since f (x) = log (x + 2) is a concave
P function,
surement, and by Theorem V.5, S(ρA (U )) ≤ 2 ebits. Pn n
We can also examine inputs that have different num- by Jensen’s inequality j=0 pj f (j) ≤ f j=0 p j j =
bers of bunched photons. If the highest number of pho- f (1) = log 3, which is achieved by substituting p1 = 1
tons in a single input mode is N , as per Lemma V.2, and pk = 0 for k ∈ {0, 2, 3, . . . , n}.
the expected number of photons in Alice’s mode will
then be bounded by N . Because the function which
Theorem V.8. Consider an interferometer with M ≥ 3
bounds the entropy, Eq. (32), is monotonically increas-
modes, where both Alice and Bob have one mode and the
ing, the entropy of Alice’s (diagonal) state (p0 , . . . , pn ) is
other output modes are measured using photon counting
at most log (1 + N )1+N /N N by Lemma V.3. In the ex-
detectors. Let the input be the n = M unbunched Fock
treme case where all the photons are bunched in a single
state. Then the maximal average entanglement that can
mode, S scales as O(log(N + 1)), consistent with Propo-
be created between Alice and Bob is log 3 ebits.
sition V.1.
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