We extend the quantum discord to continuous variable systems and evaluate Gaussian quantum discord $C(\varrho )$ for bipartite Gaussian states. In particular, for squeezed-thermal states, we explicitly maximize the extractable information over Gaussian measurements: $C(\varrho )$ is minimized by a generalized measurement rather than a projective one. Almost all squeezed-thermal states have nonzero Gaussian discord: They may be either separable or entangled if the discord is below the threshold $C(\varrho )=1$, whereas they are all entangled above the threshold. We elucidate the general role of state parameters in determining the discord and discuss its evolution in noisy channels.

We address quantum critical systems as a resource in quantum estimation and derive the ultimate quantum limits to the precision of any estimator of the coupling parameters. In particular, if $L$ denotes the size of a system and $\lambda$ is the relevant coupling parameters driving a quantum phase transition, we show that a precision improvement of order $1∕L$ may be achieved in the estimation of $\lambda$ at the critical point compared to the noncritical case. We show that analog results hold for temperature estimation in classical phase transitions. Results are illustrated by means of a specific example involving a fermion tight-binding model with pair creation (BCS model).

We develop a resource theory for continuous-variable systems grounded on operations routinely available within current quantum technologies. In particular, the set of free operations is convex and includes quadratic transformations and conditional coarse-grained measurements. The present theory lends itself to quantify both quantum non-Gaussianity and Wigner negativity as resources, depending on the choice of the free-state set—i.e., the convex hull of Gaussian states or the states with positive Wigner function, respectively. After showing that the theory admits no maximally resourceful state, we define a computable resource monotone—the Wigner logarithmic negativity. We use the latter to assess the resource content of experimentally relevant states—e.g., photon-added, photon-subtracted, cubic-phase, and cat states—and to find optimal working points of some resource concentration protocols. We envisage applications of this framework to subuniversal and universal quantum information processing over continuous variables.

Physical systems close to a quantum phase transition exhibit a divergent susceptibility, suggesting that an arbitrarily high precision may be achieved by exploiting quantum critical systems as probes to estimate a physical parameter. However, such an improvement in sensitivity is counterbalanced by the closing of the energy gap, which implies a critical slowing down and an inevitable growth of the protocol duration. Here, we design different metrological protocols that exploit the superradiant phase transition of the quantum Rabi model, a finite-component system composed of a single two-level atom interacting with a single bosonic mode. We show that, in spite of the critical slowing down, critical quantum optical probes can achieve a quantum-enhanced time scaling of the sensitivity in frequency-estimation protocols.

The measurement problem for the optical phase has been traditionally attacked for noiseless schemes or in the presence of amplitude or detection noise. Here we address the estimation of phase in the presence of phase diffusion and evaluate the ultimate quantum limits to precision for phase-shifted Gaussian states. We look for the optimal detection scheme and derive approximate scaling laws for the quantum Fisher information and the optimal squeezing fraction in terms of the total energy and the amount of noise. We also find that homodyne detection is a nearly optimal detection scheme in the limit of very small and large noise.

We address the quantification of non-Gaussianity (nG) of states and operations in continuous-variable systems and its use in quantum information. We start by illustrating in detail the properties and the relationships of two recently proposed measures of nG based on the Hilbert-Schmidt distance and the quantum relative entropy (QRE) between the state under examination and a reference Gaussian state. We then evaluate the non-Gaussianities of several families of non-Gaussian quantum states and show that the two measures have the same basic properties and also share the same qualitative behavior in most of the examples taken into account. However, we also show that they introduce a different relation of order; that is, they are not strictly monotone to each other. We exploit the nG measures for states in order to introduce a measure of nG for quantum operations, to assess Gaussification and de-Gaussification protocols, and to investigate in detail the role played by nG in entanglement-distillation protocols. Besides, we exploit the QRE-based nG measure to provide different insight on the extremality of Gaussian states for some entropic quantities such as conditional entropy, mutual information, and the Holevo bound. We also deal with parameter estimation and present a theorem connecting the QRE nG to the quantum Fisher information. Finally, since evaluation of the QRE nG measure requires the knowledge of the full density matrix, we derive some experimentally friendly lower bounds to nG for some classes of states and by considering the possibility of performing on the states only certain efficient or inefficient measurements.