Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-quantum-theory-and-quantum-computers-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2009/3/solution
Past exam of the quantum theory and quantum computers course of the University of Oxford 2009 3 Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
For classical events, : an outcome in but not in either fails or belongs to . Monotonicity and the union bound prove the Fréchet-Bell inequalityMalus' law gives transmission for a photon polarized by the first filter, so its conditional rejection probability at the second is . Conditional and joint probabilities must be distinguished: .
For equal unbiased marginals , the quantum two-setting rejection probabilities are . A classical common assignment of all three outcomes would therefore require . Choose directions . ThenFor example gives . More generally . In a triangle whose side directions are these filters, the internal angle supplementary to is obtuse exactly in this violation range. This specifies the angle convention behind the triangle description: with polarization axes regarded as unoriented lines, a claim that every sufficiently large physical axis separation violates the inequality would not be correct. The contradiction concerns a single classical joint model for all settings, not the validity of ordinary probability or a comparison of arbitrarily renormalized sequential experiments.
Use and . Projecting the first photon with gives the unnormalized product vector , with success probability . Projection of the second onto givesConditioned on success, normalize these vectors; a zero amplitude means that outcome never occurs. For the maximally entangled equal-amplitude pair, rotation of both real polarization bases gives the same correlations for arbitrary settings. Comparing the appropriately normalized coincidence/rejection frequencies at three setting pairs tests the inequality above. A general unequal-amplitude state need not reproduce the unbiased rotationally invariant probabilities, so the maximally entangled choice supplies the clean explicit example.
For swapping, label the four systems in order and let . Its overlap with is . Applying its rank-one projector to Alice's two systems givesAfter regrouping the remote and local systems, this factorizes into . The selected outcome has probability . Therefore the normalized conditional remote state isIt has Schmidt rank at least two whenever the original pair was entangled, since squaring a nonzero coefficient does not make it zero. Thus the two photons that never interacted become entangled conditional on Alice's joint measurement outcome. This is entanglement swapping. Alice is projecting onto a specified Bell state, not performing a universal test of whether an arbitrary unknown state is entangled. Averaging all her outcomes leaves the remote reduced density operator unchanged, so no faster-than-light signal is available without her classical outcome label.
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