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The generation of entangled photons from radiative cascades has enabled milestone experiments in quantum information science with several applications in photonic quantum technologies. Significant efforts are being devoted to pushing the performances of near-deterministic entangled-photon sources based on single quantum emitters often embedded in photonic cavities, so to boost the flux of photon pairs. The general postulate is that the emitter generates photons in a nearly maximally entangled state of polarization, ready for application purposes. Here, we demonstrate that this assumption is unjustified. We show that in radiative cascades there exists an interplay between photon polarization and emission wavevector, strongly affecting quantum correlations when emitters are embedded in micro-cavities. We discuss how the polarization entanglement of photon pairs from a biexciton-exciton cascade in quantum dots strongly depends on their propagation wavevector, and it can even vanish for large emission angles. Our experimental results, backed by theoretical modelling, yield a brand-new understanding of cascaded emission for various quantum emitters. In addition, our model provides quantitative guidelines for designing optical microcavities that retain both a high degree of entanglement and collection efficiency, moving the community one step further towards an ideal source of entangled photons for quantum technologies.

Quantum signal processing (QSP) is a framework which was proven to unify and simplify a large number of known quantum algorithms, as well as discovering new ones. QSP allows one to transform a signal embedded in a given unitary using polynomials. Characterizing which polynomials can be achieved with QSP protocols is an important part of the power of this technique, and while such a characterization is well-understood in the case of univariate signals, it is unclear which multivariate polynomials can be constructed when the signal is a vector, rather than a scalar. This work uses a slightly different formalism than what is found in the literature, and uses it to find simpler necessary conditions for decomposability, as well as a sufficient condition - the first, to the best of our knowledge, proven for a (generally inhomogeneous) multivariate polynomial in the context of quantum signal processing., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, comments are welcome

Quantum signal processing (QSP) and the quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) are pivotal tools for simplifying the development of quantum algorithms. These techniques leverage polynomial transformations on the eigenvalues or singular values of block-encoded matrices, achieved with the use of just one control qubit. In contexts where the control qubit is used to extract information about the eigenvalues or singular values, the amount of extractable information is limited to one bit per protocol. In this work, we extend the original QSP ansatz by introducing multiple control qubits. We show that, much like in the single-qubit case, nearly any vector of polynomials can be implemented with a multi-qubit QSP ansatz, and the gate complexity scales polynomially with the dimension of such states. Moreover, assuming that powers of the matrix to transform are easily implementable - as in Shor's algorithm - we can achieve polynomial transformations with degrees that scale exponentially with the number of control qubits. This work aims to provide a partial characterization of the polynomials that can be implemented using this approach, with phase estimation schemes and discrete logarithm serving as illustrative examples., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, comments and feedback are welcome

Current proprietary and open-source serverless platforms follow opinionated, hardcoded scheduling policies to deploy the functions to be executed over the available workers. Such policies may decrease the performance and the security of the application due to locality issues (e.g., functions executed by workers far from the databases to be accessed). These limitations are partially overcome by the adoption of APP, a new platform-agnostic declarative language that allows serverless platforms to support multiple scheduling logics. Defining the "right" scheduling policy in APP is far from being a trivial task since it often requires rounds of refinement involving knowledge of the underlying infrastructure, guesswork, and empirical testing. In this paper, we start investigating how information derived from static analysis could be incorporated into APP scheduling function policies to help users select the best-performing workers at function allocation. We substantiate our proposal by presenting a pipeline able to extract cost equations from functions' code, synthesising cost expressions through the usage of off-the-shelf solvers, and extending APP allocation policies to consider this information., Comment: In Proceedings TiCSA 2023, arXiv:2310.18720

Black-box quantum-state preparation is a variant of quantum-state preparation where we want to construct an $n$-qubit state $|\psi_c\rangle \propto \sum_x c(x) |x\rangle$ with the amplitudes $c(x)$ given as a (quantum) oracle. This variant is particularly useful when the quantum state has a short and simple classical description. We use recent techniques, namely quantum signal processing (QSP) and quantum singular value transform (QSVT), to construct a new algorithm that prepares $|\psi_c\rangle$ without the need to carry out coherent arithmetic. We then compare our result with current state-of-the-art algorithms, showing that a QSVT-based approach achieves comparable results., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, comments are welcome

Quantum Signal Processing (QSP) is a technique that can be used to implement a polynomial transformation $P(x)$ applied to the eigenvalues of a unitary $U$, essentially implementing the operation $P(U)$, provided that $P$ satisfies some conditions that are easy to satisfy. A rich class of previously known quantum algorithms were shown to be derived or reduced to this technique or one of its extensions. In this work, we show that QSP can be used to tackle a new problem, which we call phase extraction, and that this can be used to provide quantum speed-up for proportional sampling, a problem of interest in machine-learning applications and quantum state preparation. We show that, for certain sampling distributions, our algorithm provides an almost-quadratic speed-up over classical sampling procedures. Then we extend the result by constructing a sequence of algorithms that increasingly relax the dependence on the space of elements to sample., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

Random walks (or Markov chains) are models extensively used in theoretical computer science. Several tools, including analysis of quantities such as hitting and mixing times, are helpful for devising randomized algorithms. A notable example is Sch\"oning's algorithm for the satisfiability (SAT) problem. In this work, we use the density-matrix formalism to define a quantum Markov chain model which directly generalizes classical walks, and we show that a common tools such as hitting times can be computed with a similar formula as the one found in the classical theory, which we then apply to known quantum settings such as Grover's algorithm., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

The quest for the realization of effective quantum state discrimination strategies is of great interest for quantum information technology, as well as for fundamental studies. Therefore, it is crucial to develop new and more efficient methods to implement discrimination protocols for quantum states. Among the others, single photon implementations are more advisable, because of their inherent security advantage in quantum communication scenarios. In this work, we present the experimental realization of a protocol employing a time-multiplexing strategy to optimally discriminate among eight non-orthogonal states, encoded in the four-dimensional Hilbert space spanning both the polarization degree of freedom and photon energy. The experiment, built on a custom-designed bulk optics analyser setup and single photons generated by a nearly deterministic solid-state source, represents a benchmarking example of minimum error discrimination with actual quantum states, requiring only linear optics and two photodetectors to be realized. Our work paves the way for more complex applications and delivers a novel approach towards high-dimensional quantum encoding and decoding operations.

The ability to reliably distribute entanglement among the nodes of a network is an essential requirement for the development of effective quantum communication protocols and the realization of useful quantum networks. It has been demonstrated, in different contexts, that two remote systems can be entangled via local interactions with a carrier system that always remains in a separable state with respect to such distant particles. We develop a strategy for entanglement distribution via separable carriers that can be applied to any number of network nodes to achieve various entanglement distribution patterns. We show that our protocol results in multipartite entanglement, while the carrier mediating the process is always in a separable state with respect to the network. We provide examples showcasing the flexibility of our approach and propose a scheme of principle for the experimental demonstration of the protocol., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables

There is a growing interest in running legal contracts on digital systems, at the same time, it is important to understand to what extent software contracts may capture legal content. We then undertake a foundational study of legal contracts and we distill four main features: agreement, permissions, violations and obligations. We therefore design Stipula, a domain specific language that assists lawyers in programming legal contracts through specific patterns. The language is based on a small set of abstractions that correspond to common patterns in legal contracts, and that are amenable to be executed either on centralized or on distributed systems. Stipula comes with a formal semantics and an observational equivalence, that provide for a clear account of the contracts' behaviour. The expressive power of the language is illustrated by a set of examples that correspond to template contracts that are often used in practice.

The need of discriminating between different quantum states is a fundamental issue in Quantum Information and Communication. The actual realization of generally optimal strategies in this task is often limited by the need of supplemental resources and very complex receivers. We have experimentally implemented two discrimination schemes in a minimum-error scenario based on a receiver featured by a network structure and a dynamical processing of information. The first protocol implemented in our experiment, directly inspired to a recent theoretical proposal, achieves binary optimal discrimination, while the second one provides a novel approach to multi-state quantum discrimination, relying on the dynamical features of the network-like receiver. This strategy exploits the arrival time degree of freedom as an encoding variable, achieving optimal results, without the need for supplemental systems or devices. Our results further reveal the potential of dynamical approaches to Quantum State Discrimination tasks, providing a possible starting point for efficient alternatives to current experimental strategies.

We study the cryptographic primitive Oblivious Transfer; a composable construction of this resource would allow arbitrary multi-party computation to be carried out in a secure way, i.e. to compute functions in a distributed way while keeping inputs from different parties private. First we review a framework that allows us to analyze composability of classical and quantum cryptographic protocols in special relativity: Abstract Cryptography implemented with Causal Boxes. We then (1) explore and formalize different versions of oblivious transfer found in the literature, (2) prove that their equivalence holds also in relativistic quantum settings, (3) show that it is impossible to composably construct any of these versions of oblivious transfer from only classical or quantum communication among distrusting agents in relativistic settings, (4) prove that the impossibility also extends to multi-party computation, and (5) provide a mutual construction between oblivious transfer and bit commitment., Comment: 13+11 pages, many figures

The presence of disorder and inhomogeneities in quantum networks has often been unexpectedly beneficial for both quantum and classical resources. Here, we experimentally realize a controllable inhomogenous Quantum Walk dynamics, which can be exploited to investigate the effect of coherent disorder on the quantum correlations between two indistinguishable photons. Through the imposition of suitable disorder configurations, we observe two photon states which exhibit an enhancement in the quantum correlations between two modes of the network, compared to the case of an ordered Quantum Walk. Different configurations of disorder can steer the system towards different realizations of such an enhancement, thus allowing spatial and temporal manipulation of quantum correlations., Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures

We design a quantum probing protocol using Quantum Walks to investigate the Quantum Information spreading pattern. We employ Quantum Fisher Information, as a figure of merit, to quantify extractable information about an unknown parameter encoded within the Quantum Walk evolution. Although the approach is universal, we focus on the coherent static and dynamic disorder to investigate anomalous and classical transport as well as Anderson localization. Our results show that a Quantum Walk can be considered as a readout device of information about defects and perturbations occurring in complex networks, both classical and quantum., Comment: 5+2 pages, 4+2 figures