Multi-user quantum private comparison with scattered preparation and one-way convergent transmission of quantum states

Quantum private comparison (QPC) aims to accomplish the equality comparison of the secrets from different users without disclosing their genuine contents by using the principles of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we summarize eight modes of quantum state preparation and transmission existing in current QPC protocols first. Then, by using the mode of scattered preparation and one-way convergent transmission, we construct a new multi-user quantum private comparison (MQPC) protocol with two-particle maximally entangled states, which can accomplish arbitrary pair’s comparison of equality among K users within one execution. Analysis turns out that its output correctness and its security against both the outside attack and the participant attack are guaranteed. The proposed MQPC protocol can be implemented with current technologies. It can be concluded that the mode of scattered preparation and one-way convergent transmission of quantum states is beneficial to designing the MQPC protocol which can accomplish arbitrary pair’s comparison of equality among K users within one execution.     

New form Simple Structure of Maximally Eight-qubit Entanglement State

In a recent paper (Zha et al. Laser Phys. Lett. 10, 045201, 2013), presented a criterion of maximally mutiqubit entangled states (MMES). Though there are several known examples of maximally entangled quantum states of two, three, five and six qubits, the mathematical structure for multi-qubit entanglement of more than seven qubits is less clear. With an emphasis on eight qubits, by this criterion, two new forms of maximally eight-qubit MMES is obtained, where the subsystems of 1, 2, and 3-qubits are all completely mixed. We believe that the new form eight-qubit maximally entangled state can play an important role in quantum information.     

Comment on“Teleportation Protocol of Three-Qubit State Using Four-Qubit Quantum Channels”

Recently, Choudhury (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 10, 1007 2016), proposed a teleportation protocol of three-qubit state using four-qubit quantum channels.According to their scheme the three-qubit entangled states could be teleported by use of three simultaneous quantum channels of four-qubit cluster states. In this paper,we emphasize that the same three-qubit entangled states can be teleported perfectly by using only one quantum channel of four-qubit cluster states.     

Faithful quantum secure direct communication protocol against collective noise

An improved quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol is proposed in this paper.Blocks of entangled photon pairs are transmitted in two steps in which secret messages are transmitted directly.The single logical qubits and unitary operations under decoherence free subspaces are presented and the generalized Bell states are constructed which are immune to the collective noise.Two steps of qubit transmission are used in this protocol to guarantee the security of communication.The security of the protocol against various attacks are discussed.     

An Efficient and Secure Arbitrary <Emphasis Type="Italic">N</Emphasis>-Party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol Using Bell States

Two quantum key agreement protocols using Bell states and Bell measurement were recently proposed by Shukla et al. (Quantum Inf. Process. 13(11), 2391–2405, 2014). However, Zhu et al. pointed out that there are some security flaws and proposed an improved version (Quantum Inf. Process. 14(11), 4245–4254, 2015). In this study, we will show Zhu et al.’s improvement still exists some security problems, and its efficiency is not high enough. For solving these problems, we utilize four Pauli operations {I, Z, X, Y} to encode two bits instead of the original two operations {I, X} to encode one bit, and then propose an efficient and secure arbitrary N-party quantum key agreement protocol. In the protocol, the channel checking with decoy single photons is introduced to avoid the eavesdropper’s flip attack, and a post-measurement mechanism is used to prevent against the collusion attack. The security analysis shows the present protocol can guarantee the correctness, security, privacy and fairness of quantum key agreement.     

Constructing Four-Photon States for Quantum Communication and Information Processing

We provide a method for constructing a set of four-photon states suitable for quantum communication applications. Among these states is a set of concatenated quantum code states that span a decoherence-free subspace that is robust under collective-local as well as global dephasing noise. This method requires only the use of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, quantum state post-selection, and linear optics. In particular, we show how this method can be used to produce all sixteen elements of the second-order Bell gem , which includes these codes states and is an orthonormal basis for the Hilbert space of four qubits composed entirely of states that are fully entangled under the four-tangle measure.     

Effects of Quantum Noise on Quantum Clock Synchronization

In laboratory environment, the channel apparatus will generate particular dominant quantum noise. The noise then will give rise to some errors during synchronization. In this work, the accuracies of one qubit transport protocol and entangled states transport protocol in the presence of noise have been studied. With the help of three important and familiar noise models, the quantum noise will degrade the accuracy has been proved. Due to the influence of quantum noise, the accuracy of entangled qubits decrease faster than that of one qubit. The entangled states will improve the accuracy in noise-free channel, and will degrade the accuracy in noise channel.     

Efficient Three-Party Quantum Dialogue Protocol Based on the Continuous Variable GHZ States

Based on the continuous variable GHZ entangled states, an efficient three-party quantum dialogue protocol is devised, where each legitimate communication party could simultaneously deduce the secret information of the other two parties with perfect efficiency. The security is guaranteed by the correlation of the continuous variable GHZ entangled states and the randomly selected decoy states. Furthermore, the three-party quantum dialogue protocol is directly generalized to an N-party quantum dialogue protocol by using the n-tuple continuous variable GHZ entangled states.     

Bidirectional Quantum Teleportation of a Class of <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-Qubit States by Using (2<Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis> + <Emphasis Type="Bold">2</Emphasis>)-Qubit Entangled States as Quantum Channel

A new protocol of bidirectional quantum teleportation (BQT) is proposed in which the users can transmit a class of n-qubit state to each other simultaneously, by using (2n + 2)-qubit entangled states as quantum channel. The state of the art approaches can only transmit two-qubit states in each round. This scheme is based on control-not operation, single-qubit measurements and appropriate single-qubit unitary operations. It is shown that the protocol is secure in preparation phase.     

Protecting Distribution Entanglement for Two-Qubit State Using Weak Measurement and Reversal

Protection of entanglement from disturbance of the environment is an essential task in quantum information processing. We investigate the effect of the weak measurement and reversal (WMR) on the protection of the entanglement for an arbitrarily entangled two-qubit pure state from these three typical quantum noisy channels, i.e., amplitude damping channel, phase damping channel and depolarizing quantum channel. Given the parameters of the Bell-like initial qubits’ state |ψ〉 = a|00〉 + d|11〉, it is found that the WMR operation indeed helps for protecting distributed entanglement from the above three noisy quantum channels. But for the Bell-like initial qubits’ state |?〉 = b|01〉 + c|10〉, the WMR operation only protects entanglement in the amplitude damping channel, not for the phase damping and depolarizing quantum channels. In addition, we discuss how the concurrence and the success probability behave with adjusting the weak or the reversal weak measurement strength.     

Efficient and Secure Authenticated Quantum Dialogue Protocols over Collective-Noise Channels

Based on the deterministic secure quantum communication,we present a novel quantum dialogue protocol without information leakage over the collective noise channel.The logical qubits and four-qubit decoherence-free states are introduced for resisting against collective-dephasing noise,collective-rotation noise and all kinds of unitary collective noise,respectively.Compared with the existing similar protocols,the analyses on security and information-theoretical efficiency show that the proposed protocol is more secure and efficient.     

Ontological Models,Preparation Contextuality and Nonlocality

The ontological model framework for an operational theory has generated much interest in recent years. The debate concerning reality of quantum states has been made more precise in this framework. With the introduction of generalized notion of contextuality in this framework, it has been shown that completely mixed state of a qubit is preparation contextual. Interestingly, this new idea of preparation contextuality has been used to demonstrate nonlocality of some \(\psi \) -epistemic models without any use of Bell’s inequality. In particular, nonlocality of a non maximally \(\psi \) -epistemic model has been demonstrated from preparation contextuality of a maximally mixed qubit and Schrödinger’s steerability of the maximally entangled state of two qubits (Leifer and Maroney, Phys Rev Lett 110:120401, 2013). In this paper, we, show that any mixed state is preparation contextual. We, then, show that nonlocality of any bipartite pure entangled state, with Schmidt rank two, follows from preparation contextuality and steerability provided we impose certain condition on the epistemicity of the underlying ontological model. More interestingly, if the pure entangled state is of Schmidt rank greater than two, its nonlocality follows without any further condition on the epistemicity. Thus our result establishes a stronger connection between nonlocality and preparation contextuality by revealing nonlocality of any bipartite pure entangled states without any use of Bell-type inequality.     

Quantum Games under Decoherence

Quantum systems are easily influenced by ambient environments. Decoherence is generated by system interaction with external environment. In this paper, we analyse the effects of decoherence on quantum games with Eisert-Wilkens-Lewenstein (EWL) (Eisert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 83(15), 3077 1999) and Marinatto-Weber (MW) (Marinatto and Weber, Phys. Lett. A 272, 291 2000) schemes. Firstly, referring to the analytical approach that was introduced by Eisert et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 83(15), 3077 1999), we analyse the effects of decoherence on quantum Chicken game by considering different traditional noisy channels. We investigate the Nash equilibria and changes of payoff in specific two-parameter strategy set for maximally entangled initial states. We find that the Nash equilibria are different in different noisy channels. Since Unruh effect produces a decoherence-like effect and can be perceived as a quantum noise channel (Omkar et al., arXiv:1408.1477v1), with the same two parameter strategy set, we investigate the influences of decoherence generated by the Unruh effect on three-player quantum Prisoners’ Dilemma, the non-zero sum symmetric multiplayer quantum game both for unentangled and entangled initial states. We discuss the effect of the acceleration of noninertial frames on the the game’s properties such as payoffs, symmetry, Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimal, dominant strategy, etc. Finally, we study the decoherent influences of correlated noise and Unruh effect on quantum Stackelberg duopoly for entangled and unentangled initial states with the depolarizing channel. Our investigations show that under the influence of correlated depolarizing channel and acceleration in noninertial frame, some critical points exist for an unentangled initial state at which firms get equal payoffs and the game becomes a follower advantage game. It is shown that the game is always a leader advantage game for a maximally entangled initial state and there appear some points at which the payoffs become zero.     

Entanglement Dynamics of the Mixed Two-qubit System in Different Noisy Channels

We investigate the entanglement dynamics of the two-qubit entanglement quantum system when they transmitted through the Pauli channels and the depolarizing channel both independently or collectively. Making use of the concurrence we found that the entanglement of a kind of mixed two-qubit system defined in this paper can be preserved in the collective Pauli σ _y noise channel, but the entanglement of the other kind of mixed two-qubit system can be preserved in the collective Pauli σ _z noise channel. Meanwhile, our quantum systems will undergoing the entanglement sudden death (ESD) in collective depolarizing channel when they return to the maximally entangled Bell states. The reason is the Landblad operators in depolarizing channel are non-commuting operators and this finding is in accord with the previous study.     

Fault tolerant deterministic secure quantum communication using logical Bell states against collective noise

This study proposes two novel fault tolerant deterministic secure quantum communication(DSQC) schemes resistant to collective noise using logical Bell states. Either DSQC scheme is constructed based on a new coding function, which is designed by exploiting the property of the corresponding logical Bell states immune to collective-dephasing noise and collective-rotation noise, respectively. The secret message can be encoded by two simple unitary operations and decoded by merely performing Bell measurements, which can make the proposed scheme more convenient in practical applications.Moreover, the strategy of one-step quanta transmission, together with the technique of decoy logical qubits checking not only reduces the influence of other noise existing in a quantum channel, but also guarantees the security of the communication between two legitimate users. The final analysis shows that the proposed schemes are feasible and robust against various well-known attacks over the collective noise channel.     

Perfect teleportation of arbitrary n-qudit states using different quantum channels

We propose a protocol Dn for faithfully teleporting an arbitrary n-qudit state with the tensor product state (TPS) of n generalized Bell states (GBSs) as the quantum channel. We also put forward explicit protocols and for faithfully teleporting an arbitrary n-qudit state with two classes of 2n-qudit GESs as the quantum channel, where the GESs we constructed are a kind of genuine entangled states which cannot be reducible to the TPS of n GBSs.     

Large Violation of Bell Inequalities with Low Entanglement

In this paper we obtain violations of general bipartite Bell inequalities of order \({\frac{\sqrt{n}}{\log n}}\) with n inputs, n outputs and n-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Moreover, we construct explicitly, up to a random choice of signs, all the elements involved in such violations: the coefficients of the Bell inequalities, POVMs measurements and quantum states. Analyzing this construction we find that, even though entanglement is necessary to obtain violation of Bell inequalities, the entropy of entanglement of the underlying state is essentially irrelevant in obtaining large violation. We also indicate why the maximally entangled state is a rather poor candidate in producing large violations with arbitrary coefficients. However, we also show that for Bell inequalities with positive coefficients (in particular, games) the maximally entangled state achieves the largest violation up to a logarithmic factor.     

Teleportation Protocol Of Three-Qubit State Using Four-Qubit Quantum Channels

In this paper we propose a perfect teleportation protocol for certain class of three-qubit entangled states. The class of states which are teleported, is larger than those considered by Nie et al. (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 50, 2799 46) and Li et al. (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 47). We use cluster states as quantum channels. The paper is in the line of research for quantum mechanically transporting multiparticle entangled states.     

Semi-Quantum Private Comparison Using Single Photons

Recently, by using the BB84 quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, Sun et al. put forward two quantum private comparison (QPC) protocols with a semi-honest third party (TP) and a malicious TP, respectively (Sun et al., Quantum Inf. Process. 14, 2125–2133, 2015). In this paper, we absorb the concept of semi-quantumness suggested by Boyer et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99(14), 140501, 2007 and Phys. Rev. A 79(3), 032341, 2009) into Sun et al.’s QPC protocols and construct two corresponding SQPC protocols. The common interesting feature of the proposed SQPC protocols is that apart from the establishment of shared keys between different participants, the rest parts of the protocols are completely classical. The output correctness and the security of the proposed SQPC protocols are validated. Compared with the present SQPC protocols, the advantages of the proposed SQPC protocols lies in the following aspects: on the aspect of quantum resource, they employ single photons rather than Bell entangled states; with respect to quantum measurement for TP, they need single-photon measurements rather than Bell state measurements; as for quantum entanglement swapping, they do not need it at all; and the second proposed SQPC protocol takes effect under a malicious TP and makes TP know neither the genuine contents of secret inputs nor the comparison result.     

Hidden Bell Correlations in the Four-Level Atom<Superscript>†</Superscript>

We extend the Bell inequality known for two qubits to the four-level atom, including an artificial atom realized by the superconducting circuit, and qudit with j = 3/2. We formulate the extended inequality as the inequality valid for an arbitrary Hermitian nonnegative 4×4 matrix with unit trace for both separable and entangled matrices.