Computing Power of Quantum Mechanics: There is much interest in developing quantum computers in order to perform certain tasks much faster than, or that are intractable for, a classical computer. A general quantum computer, however, requires the fabrication and operation a number of quantum logic devices (see the Perspective byFranson).Broomeet al.(p.794, published online 20 December) andSpringet al.(p.798, published online 20 December) describe experiments in which single photons and quantum interference were used to perform a calculation (the permanent of a matrix) that is very difficult on a classical computer. Similar to random walks, quantum walks on a graph describe the movement of a walker on a set of predetermined paths; instead of flipping a coin to decide which way to go at each point, a quantum walker can take several paths at once.Childset al.(p.791) propose an architecture for a quantum computer, based on quantum walks of multiple interacting walkers. The system is capable of performing any quantum operation using a subset of its nodes, with the size of the subset scaling favorably with the complexity of the operation.

Deterministic quantum computation with one pure qubit (DQC1) is an efficient model of computation that uses highly mixed states. Unlike pure-state models, its power is not derived from the generation of a large amount of entanglement. Instead it has been proposed that other nonclassical correlations are responsible for the computational speedup, and that these can be captured by the quantum discord. In this Letter we implement DQC1 in an all-optical architecture, and experimentally observe the generated correlations. We find no entanglement, but large amounts of quantum discord—except in three cases where an efficient classical simulation is always possible. Our results show that even fully separable, highly mixed, states can contain intrinsically quantum mechanical correlations and that these could offer a valuable resource for quantum information technologies.

We study the simultaneous estimation of multiple phases as a discretized model for the imaging of a phase object. We identify quantum probe states that provide an enhancement compared to the best quantum scheme for the estimation of each individual phase separately as well as improvements over classical strategies. Our strategy provides an advantage in the variance of the estimation over individual quantum estimation schemes that scales as $\mathcal{O}(d)$, where $d$ is the number of phases. Finally, we study the attainability of this limit using realistic probes and photon-number-resolving detectors. This is a problem in which an intrinsic advantage is derived from the estimation of multiple parameters simultaneously.

By weakly measuring the polarization of a photon between two strong polarization measurements, we experimentally investigate the correlation between the appearance of anomalous values in quantum weak measurements and the violation of realism and nonintrusiveness of measurements. A quantitative formulation of the latter concept is expressed in terms of a Leggett–Garg inequality for the outcomes of subsequent measurements of an individual quantum system. We experimentally violate the Leggett–Garg inequality for several measurement strengths. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate that there is a one-to-one correlation between achieving strange weak values and violating the Leggett–Garg inequality.