Browsing by Author "Amaral, Barbara Lopes"

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    Noncontextual wirings.
    (2018) Amaral, Barbara Lopes; Cabello Quintero, Adán; Cunha, Marcelo de Oliveira Terra; Aolita, Leandro
    Contextuality is a fundamental feature of quantum theory necessary for certain models of quantum computation and communication. Serious steps have therefore been taken towards a formal framework for contextuality as an operational resource. However, the main ingredient of a resource theory—a concrete, explicit form of free operations of contextuality—was still missing. Here we provide such a component by introducing noncontextual wirings: a class of contextuality-free operations with a clear operational interpretation and a friendly parametrization. We characterize them completely for general black-box measurement devices with arbitrarily many inputs and outputs. As applications, we show that the relative entropy of contextuality is a contextuality monotone and that maximally contextual boxes that serve as contextuality bits exist for a broad class of scenarios. Our results complete a unified resource-theoretic framework for contextuality and Bell nonlocality.
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    Quantifying Bell nonlocality with the trace distance.
    (2018) Brito, Samuraí Gomes de Aguiar; Amaral, Barbara Lopes; Araújo, Rafael Chaves Souto
    Measurements performed on distant parts of an entangled quantum state can generate correlations incompatible with classical theories respecting the assumption of local causality. This is the phenomenon known as quantum nonlocality that, apart from its fundamental role, can also be put to practical use in applications such as cryptography and distributed computing. Clearly, developing ways of quantifying nonlocality is an important primitive in this scenario. Here, we propose to quantify the nonlocality of a given probability distribution via its trace distance to the set of classical correlations. We show that this measure is a monotone under the free operations of a resource theory and, furthermore, that it can be computed efficiently with a linear program. We put our framework to use in a variety of relevant Bell scenarios also comparing the trace distance to other standard measures in the literature.
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    Quantum theory allows for absolute maximal contextuality.
    (2015) Amaral, Barbara Lopes; Cunha, Marcelo de Oliveira Terra; Cabello Quintero, Adán
    Contextuality is a fundamental feature of quantum theory and a necessary resource for quantum computation and communication. It is therefore important to investigate how large contextuality can be in quantum theory. Linear contextuality witnesses can be expressed as a sum S of n probabilities, and the independence number α and the Tsirelson-like number θ of the corresponding exclusivity graph are, respectively, the maximum of S for noncontextual theories and for the theory under consideration. A theory allows for absolute maximal contextuality if it has scenarios in which θ/α approaches n. Here we show that quantum theory allows for absolute maximal contextuality despite what is suggested by the examination of the quantum violations of Bell and noncontextuality inequalities considered in the past. Our proof is not constructive and does not single out explicit scenarios. Nevertheless, we identify scenarios in which quantum theory allows for almost-absolute-maximal contextuality.
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    Roughness as classicality indicator of a quantum state.
    (2018) Lemos, Humberto César Fernandes; Almeida, Alexandre Celestino Leite de; Amaral, Barbara Lopes; Oliveira, Adélcio Carlos de
    We define a new quantifier of classicality for a quantum state, the Roughness, which is given by the L2(R2)distance between Wigner and Husimi functions. We show that the Roughness is bounded and therefore it is a useful tool for comparison between different quantum states for single bosonic systems. The state classification via the Roughness is not binary, but rather it is continuous in the interval [0, 1], being the state more classic as the Roughness approaches to zero, and more quantum when it is closer to the unity. The Roughness is maximum for Fock states when its number of photons is arbitrarily large, and also for squeezed states at the maximum compression limit. On the other hand, the Roughness approaches its minimum value for thermal states at infinite temperature and, more generally, for infinite entropy states. The Roughness of a coherent state is slightly below one half, so we may say that it is more a classical state than a quantum one. Another important result is that the Roughness performs well for discriminating both pure and mixed states. Since the Roughness measures the inherent quantumness of a state, we propose another function, the Dynamic Distance Measure (DDM), which is suitable for measure how much quantum is a dynamics. Using DDM, we studied the quartic oscillator, and we observed that there is a certain complementarity between dynamics and state, i.e. when dynamics becomes more quantum, the Roughness of the state decreases, while the Roughness grows as the dynamics becomes less quantum.