Entropy production, a quantity associated with the emergence of the arrow of time, has been successfully measured in a microscopic quantum system. Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this arrow of time is associated with a positive mean entropy production. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance setup, we measure the nonequilibrium entropy produced in an isolated spin-1/2 system following fast quenches of an external magnetic field and experimentally demonstrate that it is equal to the entropic dista
Within the broad research scenario of quantum secure communication, two-way quantum-key-distribution (TWQKD) is a relatively new proposal for sharing secret keys that is not fully explored yet. We analyse the security of TWQKD schemes that use qubits prepared in non-orthogonal states to transmit the key. Investigating protocols that employ an arbitrary number of bases for the channel preparation, we show, in particular, that the security of the LM05 protocol can not be improved by the use of more than two preparation bases. We also provide a new proof of unconditional security for a deterministic TWQKD protocol recently proposed [Phys. Rev. A 88, 062302 (2013)]. In addition, we introduce a n
It is well known that a quantum correlated probe can yield better precision in estimating an unknown parameter than classically possible. However, how such a quantum probe should be measured remains somewhat elusive. We examine the role of measurements in quantum metrology by considering two types of readout strategies: coherent, where all probes are measured simultaneously in an entangled basis; and adaptive, where probes are measured sequentially, with each measurement one way conditioned on the prior outcomes. Here we firstly show that for classically correlated probes the two readout strategies yield the same precision. Secondly, we construct an example of a noisy multipartite quantum sy
