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Abstract: In this paper, the results of XPS and AFM studies of the surface chemistry and morphology of In2O3 nanolayers obtained by rheotaxial growth and vacuum oxidation (RGVO) technology are presented. The ultrathin In films were deposited under UHV by thermal evaporation of indium pellets on the well defined Si substrate maintained at different temperatures. Optimal conditions to obtain the smallest grains and highest surface coverage have been determined, which was controlled by AFM, whereas the cleanness of deposited In nanolayers was controlled by XPS method. The ultrathin films of In2O3 (nm scale) were obtained in two ways, i.e. by oxidation of ultrathin films of In after their deposition, as well as by oxidation of In ultrathin films already during the deposition process. The XPS experiments showed that in both cases the obtained ultrathin films of In2O3 were almost stoichiometric. In turn, the AFM studies confirmed that only ultrathin films obtained during the simultaneous In deposition and oxidation exhibit almost flat surface morphology with average roughness at the level of about 0.85nm. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this work, we analyze the local certification of unitary quantum channels, which is a natural extension of quantum hypothesis testing. A particular case of a quantum channel operating on two systems corresponding to product states at the input, is considered. The goal is to minimize the probability of the type II error, given a specified maximum probability of the type I error, considering assistance through entanglement with auxiliary systems. Our result indicates connection of the local certification problem with a product numerical range of unitary matrices. We show that the optimal local strategy does not need usage of auxiliary systems and requires only single round of one-way classical communication. Moreover, we compare local and global certification strategies and show that typically local strategies are optimal, yet in some extremal cases, where global strategies make no errors, local ones may fail miserably. Finally, some application for local certification of von Neumann measurements are discussed as well., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Motivated by recent efforts to develop quantum computing for practical, industrial-scale challenges, we demonstrate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art hybrid (not necessarily quantum) solvers in addressing the business-centric optimization problem of scheduling Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs). Some solvers can already leverage noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. In our study, we utilize D-Wave hybrid solvers that implement classical heuristics with potential assistance from a quantum processing unit. This hybrid methodology performs comparably to existing classical solvers. However, due to the proprietary nature of the software, the precise contribution of quantum computation remains unclear. Our analysis focuses on a practical, business-oriented scenario: scheduling AGVs within a factory constrained by limited space, simulating a realistic production setting. Our approach maps a realistic AGVs problem onto one reminiscent of railway scheduling and demonstrates that the AGVs problem is better suited to quantum computing than its railway counterpart, the latter being denser in terms of the average number of constraints per variable. The main idea here is to highlight the potential usefulness of a hybrid approach for handling AGVs scheduling problems of practical sizes. We show that a scenario involving up to 21 AGVs, significant due to possible deadlocks, can be efficiently addressed by a hybrid solver in seconds., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The topic of causality has recently gained traction quantum information research. This work examines the problem of single-shot discrimination between process matrices which are an universal method defining a causal structure. We provide an exact expression for the optimal probability of correct distinction. In addition, we present an alternative way to achieve this expression by using the convex cone structure theory. We also express the discrimination task as semidefinite programming. Due to that, we have created the SDP calculating the distance between process matrices and we quantify it in terms of the trace norm. As a valuable by-product, the program finds an optimal realization of the discrimination task. We also find two classes of process matrices which can be distinguished perfectly. Our main result, however, is a consideration of the discrimination task for process matrices corresponding to quantum combs. We study which strategy, adaptive or non-signalling, should be used during the discrimination task. We proved that no matter which strategy you choose, the probability of distinguishing two process matrices being a quantum comb is the same., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Certification of quantum channels is based on quantum hypothesis testing and involves also preparation of an input state and choosing the final measurement. This work primarily focuses on the scenario when the false negative error cannot occur, even if it leads to the growth of the probability of false positive error. We establish a condition when it is possible to exclude false negative error after a finite number of queries to the quantum channel in parallel, and we provide an upper bound on the number of queries. On top of that, we found a class of channels which allow for excluding false negative error after a finite number of queries in parallel, but cannot be distinguished unambiguously. Moreover, it will be proved that parallel certification scheme is always sufficient, however the number of steps may be decreased by the use of adaptive scheme. Finally, we consider examples of certification of various classes of quantum channels and measurements., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

In this work, we study two different approaches to defining the entropy of a quantum channel. One of these is based on the von Neumann entropy of the corresponding Choi-Jamiołkowski state. The second one is based on the relative entropy of the output of the extended channel relative to the output of the extended completely depolarizing channel. This entropy then needs to be optimized over all possible input states. Our results first show that the former entropy provides an upper bound on the latter. Next, we show that for unital qubit channels, this bound is saturated. Finally, we conjecture and provide numerical intuitions that the bound can also be saturated for random channels as their dimension tends to infinity.

In this report we study certification of quantum measurements, which can be viewed as the extension of quantum hypotheses testing. This extension involves also the study of the input state and the measurement procedure. Here, we will be interested in two-point (binary) certification scheme in which the null and alternative hypotheses are single element sets. Our goal is to minimize the probability of the type II error given some fixed statistical significance. In this report, we begin with studying the two-point certification of pure quantum states and unitary channels to later use them to prove our main result, which is the certification of von Neumann measurements in single-shot and parallel scenarios. From our main result follow the conditions when two pure states, unitary operations and von Neumann measurements cannot be distinguished perfectly but still can be certified with a given statistical significance. Moreover, we show the connection between the certification of quantum channels or von Neumann measurements and the notion of q-numerical range.

In this work we study the entropy of the Gibbs state corresponding to a graph. The Gibbs state is obtained from the Laplacian, normalized Laplacian or adjacency matrices associated with a graph. We calculated the entropy of the Gibbs state for a few classes of graphs and studied their behavior with changing graph order and temperature. We illustrate our analytical results with numerical simulations for Erdős-Rényi, Watts-Strogatz, Barabási-Albert and Chung-Lu graph models and a few real-world graphs. Our results show that the behavior of Gibbs entropy as a function of the temperature differs for a choice of real networks when compared to the random Erdős-Rényi graphs.

Numerical investigations are an important research tool in quantum information theory. There already exists a wide range of computational tools for quantum information theory implemented in various programming languages. However, there is little effort in implementing this kind of tools in the Julia language. Julia is a modern programming language designed for numerical computation with excellent support for vector and matrix algebra, extended type system that allows for implementation of elegant application interfaces and support for parallel and distributed computing. QuantumInformation.jl is a new quantum information theory library implemented in Julia that provides functions for creating and analyzing quantum states, and for creating quantum operations in various representations. An additional feature of the library is a collection of functions for sampling random quantum states and operations such as unitary operations and generic quantum channels., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

We introduce the model of generalized open quantum walks on networks using the Transition Operation Matrices formalism. We focus our analysis on the mean first passage time and the average return time in Apollonian networks. These results differ significantly from a classical walk on these networks. We show a comparison of the classical and quantum behaviour of walks on these networks.