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arXiv:0804.2384 · Physical Review A

Heralded generation of multiphoton entanglement

Philip John Walther, Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger

Published Jan 12, 2007• 45 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a scheme, based only on linear optics and standard photon detection, that allows to generate heralded multiphoton entangled states of arbitrary photon number from spontaneous parametric downconversion (PDC) in the weak interaction regime. The scheme also works in the strong interaction regime, i.e., for the production of large photon numbers, when photon-number resolving detectors with nearly perfect quantum efficiency are used. In addition, the same setup can be used for quantum metrology as multiphoton interferometer with sensitivity at the Heisenberg limit.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.75.012313

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We present a scheme, based only on linear optics and standard photon detection, that allows to generate heralded multiphoton entangled states of arbitrary photon number from spontaneous parametric downconversion (PDC) in the weak interaction regime. The scheme also works in the strong interaction regime, i.e., for the production of large photon numbers, when photon-number resolving detectors with nearly perfect quantum efficiency are used. In addition, the same setup can be used for quantum metrology as multiphoton interferometer with sensitivity at the Heisenberg limit.
Multiphoton entanglement in the same polarization has been theoretically shown to be obtainable by type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), which can generate bright pulses more easily than type-II SPDC. A quantum cryptographic protocol utilizing photon number coding of the detected type-I entangled multiphotons is described. The information capacity versus photon number is calculated after considering the transmission loss inside the optical fiber and the detector efficiency, considering possible attacks to the scheme. The result thus achieved compares very favorably with all other schemes employing entanglement.
Abstract Quantum phenomena such as entanglement can improve fundamental limits on the sensitivity of a measurement probe. In optical interferometry, a probe consisting of N entangled photons provides up to a N\sqrt{N}N​ N enhancement in phase sensitivity compared to a classical probe of the same energy. Here, we employ high-gain parametric down-conversion sources and photon-number-resolving detectors to perform interferometry with heralded quantum probes of sizes up to N = 8 (i.e. measuring up to 16-photon coincidences). Our probes are created by injecting heralded photon-number states into an interferometer, and in principle provide quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity even in the presence of significant optical loss. Our work paves the way toward quantum-enhanced interferometry using large entangled photonic states.
We propose two interesting methods of generating the four-photon W state. These methods use parametric down-conversion processes, linear optical elements, and commercial photon detectors, which are readily feasible under current technology. They can also be used to generate the three-photon W state, the three-photon Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state, and the three-photon maximally entangled photon-number state (a typical photon-number entanglement state) by simply changing some experimental components or their parameters. Moreover, assuming we have photon number-resolving detectors, these methods can develop into methods that generate a general n -photon W state. They are expected to become powerful tools for experimental investigations of multipartite entanglement and its applications to quantum information processing.
We propose two interesting methods of generating the four-photon WWW state. These methods use parametric down-conversion processes, linear optical elements, and commercial photon detectors, which are readily feasible under current technology. They can also be used to generate the three-photon WWW state, the three-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, and the three-photon maximally entangled photon-number state (a typical photon-number entanglement state) by simply changing some experimental components or their parameters. Moreover, assuming we have photon number-resolving detectors, these methods can develop into methods that generate a general nnn-photon WWW state. They are expected to become powerful tools for experimental investigations of multipartite entanglement and its applications to quantum information processing.
Entangled photons are a crucial resource for linear optical quantum communication and quantum computation. Besides the remarkable progress of photon state engineering using atomic memories (Kimble (2008); Yuan et al. (2008)) the majority of current experiments is based on the production of photon pairs in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), where the entangled photon pair is concluded from post-selection of randomly occurring coincidences. Here we present new insights into the heralded generation of photon states (Barz et al. (2010); Wagenknecht et al. (2010)) that are maximally entangled in polarization (Schrodinger (1935)) with linear optics and standard photon detection from SPDC (Kwiat et al. (1995)). We utilize the down-conversion state corresponding to the generation of three pairs of photons, where the coincident detection of four auxiliary photons unambiguously heralds the successful preparation of the entangled state (Śliwa & Banaszek (2003)). This controlled generation of entangled photon states is a significant step towards the applicability of a linear optics quantum network (Nielsen & Chuang (2000)), in particular for entanglement distribution (Bennett et al. (1996)), entanglement swapping (Kaltenbaek et al. (2009); Pan et al. (1998)), quantum teleportation (Bouwmeester et al. (1997)), quantum cryptography (Bennett & Brassard (1984); Ekert (1991); Jennewein et al. (2000)) and scalable approaches towards photonics-based quantum computing schemes (Browne & Rudolph (2004); Gottesman & Chuang (1999); Knill et al. (2001)).