Indefinite causal order towards continuous-variable quantum systems.

Indefinite causal order has attracted a growing attention during the last decade, with the quantum switch being its most prominent instance. The quantum switch has been implemented in several photonic experiments and has also provided computational advantages in several tasks. However, indefinite causal order on continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems has been barely studied. This thesis suggests that applications of indefinite causal order on CV quantum systems may offer broader advantages than using finite-dimensional quantum systems. We follow an exploratory approach comparing the performance of the quantum switch with high-dimensional and CV quantum systems in some applications to quantum computing and quantum metrology. In particular, we use Complex Hadamard matrices to introduce a generalised family of promise problems, which reduces to the known Fourier and Hadamard promise problems as limiting cases. We show that the quantum switch provides query advantage for both the continuous and discrete cases, and prove that a CV system is necessary for implementing the most general promise problem. In addition, we propose an estimation procedure for d-dimensional unitary transformations using the quantum switch. For d > 2, the unitary transformations close to the identity are estimated saturating the quantum Cram´ er-Rao bound. For d = 2, the estimation of all unitary transformations is also optimal with some prior information. We replace the unitary transformation by an arbitrary quantum channel and show that our procedure encodes the χ matrix of the channel in the output state of the control system. Although indefinite causal order does not offer metrological advantage in our proposal, it is worthy to note that an extension to the CV regime would require an infinite-dimensional control system. This inspires the introduction of the quantum switch with continuous control, which leads to new phenomena such as the accelerando/rallentando effect. We conclude that using CV systems enlarges the number of tasks benefited by indefinite causal order and exhibits new phenomena within the field.