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The amount of information that a noisy channel can transmit has been one of the primary subjects of interest in information theory. In this work we consider a practically-motivated family of optical quantum channels that can be implemented without an external energy source. We optimize the Holevo information over procedures that encode information in attenuations and phase-shifts applied by these channels on a resource state of finite energy. It is shown that for any given input state and environment temperature, the maximum Holevo information can be achieved by an encoding procedure that uniformly distributes the channel's phase-shift parameter. Moreover for large families of input states, any maximizing encoding scheme has a finite number of channel attenuation values, simplifying the codewords to a finite number of rings around the origin in the output phase space. The above results and numerical evidence suggests that this property holds for all resource states. Our results are directly applicable to the quantum reading of an optical memory in the presence of environmental thermal noise.

Quantum information-processing techniques enable work extraction from a system's inherently quantum features, in addition to the classical free energy it contains. Meanwhile, the science of computational mechanics affords tools for the predictive modeling of non-Markovian classical and quantum stochastic processes. We combine tools from these two sciences to develop a technique for predictive work extraction from non-Markovian stochastic processes with quantum outputs. We demonstrate that this technique can extract more work than non-predictive quantum work extraction protocols, on the one hand, and predictive work extraction without quantum information processing, on the other. We discover a phase transition in the efficacy of memory for work extraction from quantum processes, which is without classical precedent. Our work opens up the prospect of machines that harness environmental free energy in an essentially quantum, essentially time-varying form.

Abstract Thermodynamic resources, beyond their well-known usefulness in work extraction and other thermodynamic tasks, are often important also in tasks that are not evidently thermodynamic. Here we develop a framework for identifying such resources in diverse applications of bosonic continuous-variable systems. Introducing the class of bosonic linear thermal operations to model operationally feasible processes, we apply this model to identify uniquely quantum properties of bosonic states that refine classical notions of thermodynamic resourcefulness. Among these are (1) a suite of temperature-like quantities generalizing the equilibrium temperature to quantum, non-equilibrium scenarios; (2) signal-to-noise ratios quantifying a system’s capacity to carry information in phase-space displacement; and (3) well-established non-classicality measures quantifying the resolution in sensing and parameter estimation tasks.

Summary: To date, MXene dispersions have been mostly limited to polar solvents. Here, we show that when the lithium cations present between MXene multilayers after etching are exchanged with di(hydrogenated tallow)benzyl methyl ammonium chloride (DHT), they become organophilic and form highly stable colloidal suspensions in nonpolar solvents. The rapid cation exchange occurs under ambient conditions and the resulting two-dimensional flakes are well dispersed and remain oxide free. A 142 ± 0.7-μm thick film (≈10 mg ⋅ cm−2) made from a DHT-Ti3C2Tz suspension in toluene exhibits pseudocapacitive behavior, with a capacitance of 305 F ⋅ g−1 at a scan rate 2 mV ⋅ s−1. The moduli and tensile strengths of solution-processed polyethylene nanocomposites are increased by ≈11% and 32% with a loading of ≈1 vol% DHT-Ti3C2Tz. Our approach may enable the use of MXenes in multiple research and industrial fields.

We characterize the operational capabilities of quantum channels which can neither create nor detect quantum coherence vis-à-vis efficiently manipulating coherence as a resource. We study the class of dephasing-covariant operations (DIO), unable to detect the coherence of any input state, as well as introduce an operationally motivated class of channels ρ-DIO, which is tailored to a specific input state. We first show that pure-state transformations under DIO are completely governed by majorization, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for such transformations and adding to the list of operational paradigms where majorization plays a central role. We then show that ρ-DIO are strictly more powerful: although they cannot detect the coherence of the input state ρ, the operations ρ-DIO can distill more coherence than DIO. However, the advantage disappears in the task of coherence dilution as well as generally in the asymptotic limit, where both sets of operations achieve the same rates in all transformations.

A greener synthesis protocol for noble nanometals is developed using vitamin B12 as a reducing and capping agent in conjunction with the use of microwaves. Successful assembly of nanoparticles or microparticles with varied shapes and sizes have been demonstrated. The synthesized Ag, Au, and Pd samples were thoroughly characterized with X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, high resolution transmission microscopy, and UV-visible spectrophotometry, confirming that metallic Ag, Au, and Pd were synthesized by the green chemistry method.

Genuinely quantum states of a harmonic oscillator may be distinguished from their classical counterparts by the Glauber-Sudarshan P representation—a state lacking a positive P function is said to be nonclassical. In this paper, we propose a general operational framework for studying nonclassicality as a resource in networks of passive linear elements and measurements with feed forward. Within this setting, we define new measures of nonclassicality based on the quantum fluctuations of quadratures, as well as the quantum Fisher information of quadrature displacements. These measures lead to fundamental constraints on the manipulation of nonclassicality, especially its concentration into subsystems, that apply to generic multimode non-Gaussian states. Special cases of our framework include no-go results in the concentration of squeezing and a complete hierarchy of nonclassicality for single-mode Gaussian states.

Historically, the element of uncertainty in quantum mechanics has been expressed through mathematical identities called uncertainty relations, a great many of which continue to be discovered. These relations use diverse measures to quantify uncertainty (and joint uncertainty). In this paper we use operational information-theoretic principles to identify the common essence of all such measures, thereby defining measure-independent notions of uncertainty and joint uncertainty. We find that most existing entropic uncertainty relations use measures of joint uncertainty that yield themselves to a small class of operational interpretations. Our notion relaxes this restriction, revealing previously unexplored joint uncertainty measures. To illustrate the utility of our formalism, we derive an uncertainty relation based on one such new measure. We also use our formalism to gain insight into the conditions under which measure-independent uncertainty relations can be found.