Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2506.09704

Accidental coincidences in camera-based high-dimensional entanglement certification

Abstract

High-dimensional entangled states, such as spatially-entangled photon pairs produced by Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion (SPDC), are a key resource for quantum technologies. In recent years, camera-based coincidence counting approaches have considerably improved the ability to characterize them in terms of speed and dimensionality. However, these methods have limitations, including in most of them the necessity to subtract accidental coincidences. Here, we study the role of these accidentals in entanglement certification for a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array and an intensified time-stamping (Tpx3Cam) camera. Using both Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) and entropy-based criteria, we show that the level of accidental coincidences - determined by the temporal characteristics of the camera - and whether they are subtracted critically impact entanglement certification. In particular, we demonstrate that current single-photon camera technologies enable entanglement certification without accidental subtraction only if a Gaussian approximation is applied to the measured two-photon state. Our work is important for developing quantum-optics application in adversarial scenarios, such as high-dimensional quantum key distribution (HD-QKD), and also for loophole-free experimental testing of quantum foundations.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Raphaël Guitter, Baptiste Courme, Chloé Vernière, Peter Svihra, Andrei Nomerotski, Hugo Defienne. 2025-06-11. Accidental coincidences in camera-based high-dimensional entanglement certification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09704

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Fermionic magic resources in disordered quantum spin chains

Fermionic non-Gaussianity quantifies a quantum state's deviation from a classically tractable free-fermionic description, constituting a necessary resource for computational quantum advantage. Here we use fermionic antiflatness (FAF) to measure this deviation across ergodic and many-body localized (MBL) regimes. We focus on the paradigmatic disordered spin-$1\!/2$ XXZ chain and its impurity variant with local interactions. Across highly excited eigenstates, FAF evolves from typical-state behavior at weak disorder to strongly suppressed values deep in the MBL regime, with volume-law scaling in the XXZ chain and an area-law bound in the impurity setting. Rare long-range cat-like eigenstates exhibit a pronounced enhancement of FAF, making it a sensitive diagnostic of mechanisms proposed to destabilize MBL. Starting from product states, we find that in the MBL regime FAF grows slowly in time, approaching saturation via a power-law relaxation. Overall, our results show that MBL suppresses fermionic non-Gaussianity, and the associated complexity beyond free fermions, while ergodicity restores it, motivating explorations of fermionic non-Gaussianity in other ergodicity-breaking phenomena.

quant-ph

Progressive Binarization - Pauli Correlation Encoding: a Continuation Method for Constrained Optimization

Pauli Correlation Encoding (PCE) reduces the qubit requirements of quantum optimization by embedding the problem variables into the expectation values of Pauli observables, so that the number of qubits can be much smaller than the number of variables. PCE has not yet been studied for constrained optimization. We extend it to constrained combinatorial problems, using the budget-constrained MinCut as a case study, and show that the standard formulation fails to reliably enforce the constraint: feasibility hinges on the binarization of the encoded variables, which depends sensitively on hyperparameters that are hard to tune and do not transfer across instances. To address this, we introduce Progressive-Binarization PCE (PB-PCE), an adaptive continuation scheme that progressively increases the binarization parameter while re-optimizing the circuit from the previous solution, driving the variables towards the binary domain. PB-PCE attains near-complete constraint satisfaction (88--100\%) and smaller cut sizes than standard PCE, with a number of stages (10--20) essentially independent of problem size, solving instances of up to 300 variables with only 9-qubit circuits.

quant-ph

A quantum model for synchronizing finite state transition systems

We propose a quantum model for finding a resetting input sequence (RS) which can take a finite state transition system (FA), to particular state independent of its current state. The complexity of finding such sequences for various types of FA can be NP-Hard or even PSPACE-Complete. To this end, we represent the FA states, inputs, and transition function in quantum space. Accordingly, we propose a model to represent the execution of an input sequence of a particular length $l$ starting form an initial FA state. The model is extended considering the application in superposition of all input sequences of length $l$ to an initial state of the FA. The model is further extended considering the application of all input sequences to all initial states of the FA capturing for every input sequence the collection (ordered list) of states reached by applying the sequence to all states of the FA. The amplitude amplification algorithm is then used as it combines similar collections of reached states while preserving all input sequences that reach these collections. A Grover search for a reached collection where its elements correspond to the same FA state provides a RS for the FA. Our approach offers a quadratic gain over the exponential complexity of traditional brute-force method, which is the only method that can be applied to a general FA class.

quant-ph