Rene Schwonnek

Postdoc

Room: B-106

Phone: +49 271 740 3797

Preprints

See also arxiv

Rene Schwonnek, Koon Tong Goh, Ignatius W. Primaatmaja, Ernest Y. -Z. Tan, Ramona Wolf, Valerio Scarani and Charles C. -W. Lim
Robust Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution
arXiv:2005.02691

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) is the art of using untrusted devices to distribute secret keys in an insecure network. It thus represents the ultimate form of cryptography, offering not only information-theoretic security against channel attacks, but also against attacks exploiting implementation loopholes. In recent years, much progress has been made towards realising the first DIQKD experiments, but current proposals are just out of reach of today's loophole-free Bell experiments. In this Letter, we close the gap between the theory and practice of DIQKD with a simple variant of the original protocol based on the celebrated Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality. In using two randomly chosen key generating bases instead of one, we show that the noise tolerance of DIQKD can be significantly improved. In particular, the extended feasibility region now covers some of the most recent loophole-free CHSH experiments, hence indicating that the first realisation of DIQKD already lies within the range of these experiments.

Ernest Y. -Z. Tan, René Schwonnek, Koon Tong Goh, Ignatius William Primaatmaja and Charles C. -W. Lim
Computing secure key rates for quantum key distribution with untrusted devices
arXiv:1908.11372

Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) provides the strongest form of secure key exchange, using only the input-output statistics of the devices to achieve information-theoretic security. Although the basic security principles of DIQKD are now well-understood, it remains a technical challenge to derive reliable and robust security bounds for advanced DIQKD protocols that go beyond the existing results based on violations of the CHSH inequality. In this Letter, we present a framework based on semi-definite programming that gives reliable lower bounds on the asymptotic secret key rate of any QKD protocol using untrusted devices. In particular, our method can in principle be utilized to find achievable secret key rates for any DIQKD protocol, based on the full input-output probability distribution or any choice of Bell inequality. Our method also extends to other DI cryptographic tasks.

René Schwonnek and Reinhard F. Werner
Properties of the Wigner distribution for n arbitrary operators
arXiv:1802.08343

We study a generalization of the Wigner function to arbitrary tuples of hermitian operators, which is a distribution uniquely characterized by the property that the marginals for all linear combinations of the given operators agree with the quantum mechanical distributions. Its role as a joint quasi-probability distribution is underlined by the property that its support always lies in the set of expectation value tuples of the operators. We characterize the set of singularities and positivity, and provide some basic examples.

René Schwonnek and Reinhard F. Werner
Wigner distributions for n arbitrary observables
arXiv:1802.08342

We study a generalization of the Wigner function to arbitrary tuples of hermitian operators. We show that for any collection of hermitian operators A1...An , and any quantum state there is a unique joint distribution on R^n, with the property that the marginals of all linear combinations of the operators coincide with their quantum counterpart. In other words, we consider the inverse Radon transform of the exact quantum probability distributions of all linear combinations. We call it the Wigner distribution, because for position and momentum this property defines the standard Wigner function. We discuss the application to finite dimensional systems, establish many basic properties and illustrate these by examples. The properties include the support, the location of singularities, positivity, the behavior under symmetry groups, and informational completeness.

Rene Schwonnek
Additivity of entropic uncertainty relations
arXiv:1801.04602

We consider the uncertainty between two pairs of local projective measurements performed on a multipartite system. We show that the optimal bound in any linear uncertainty relation, formulated in terms of the Shannon entropy, is additive. This directly implies, against naive intuition, that the minimal entropic uncertainty can always be realized by fully separable states. Hence, in contradiction to proposals by other authors, no entanglement witness can be constructed solely by comparing the attainable uncertainties of entangled and separable states. However, our result gives rise to a huge simplification for computing global uncertainty bounds as they now can be deduced from local ones. Furthermore, we provide the natural generalization of the Maassen and Uffink inequality for linear uncertainty relations with arbitrary positive coefficients.