Indistinguishability of identical particles as a genuine quantum resource for quantum information processing

This thesis is dedicated to the study of identical particles and to the exploitation of theirindistinguishability as a useful quantum resource for quantum information protocols.We begin by reviewing the main implications of dealing with systems of identical particles(Chapter 1). In particular, we recall the standard, label-based first quantizationapproach to identical particles, we highlight the issues it raises in evaluating the quantumcorrelations between them, and we discuss alternative approaches providing differentsolutions. The notion of spatial indistinguishability is here introduced together with therelated spatially localized operations and classical communication framework, in relationto the concepts of no which-particle, no which-way, and no which-spin information. Weproceed with the presentation of the main manuscripts published during my PhD studiesat Università degli Studi di Palermo. These include a review and generalization to themany-body scenario of the above mentioned tools (Chapter 2), a theoretical design andexperimental implementation of an optical setup exploiting spatial indistinguishability ofidentical constituents to directly measure their exchange phase (Chapter 3), the analysis ofspatial indistinguishability as a resource to protect entanglement between identical qubitsfrom the detrimental action of local noise (Chapter 4), the development of a protocol forthe robust distillation of entangled states exploiting interferometric effects between twoidentical bosonic qubits (Chapter 6), its extension to fermionic qubits (Chapter 7), anda generalization of this scheme for the robust generation of generalized bosonic singletstates (Chapter 8). Also, an original chapter (Chapter 5) tackles an issue emerging withthe previously introduced notion of spatial indistinguishability, sets it in relation with theoccurrence of interferometric effects, and propose a solution which overcomes the problemand opens the way for new investigations. Chapter 5 shall be useful to better understandthe physics underlying the results of the successive Chapters 6-8.