So far, various multiphoton entangled states have been observed experimentally by using different experimental setups. We present a scheme to realize many stochastic local operations and classical communication inequivalent states of three and four qubits via projective measurements on suitable entangled states. We demonstrate how these states can be observed experimentally in a single setup and study the feasibility of implementation with present-day technology.
So far, various multiphoton entangled states have been observed experimentally by using different experimental setups. We present a scheme to realize many stochastic local operations and classical communication inequivalent states of three and four qubits via projective measurements on suitable entangled states. We demonstrate how these states can be observed experimentally in a single setup and study the feasibility of implementation with present-day technology.
We present strategies to obtain different classes of three and four photon entangled symmetric states from a single experimental setup. The basic idea originates from the property of the symmetric Dicke state with two excitations to connect the two inequivalent types of genuine tripartite entanglement. We experimentally confirm the distinct types of entanglement of the observed states. We further propose an extension of the applied scheme that allows one to obtain different classes of four-photon entanglement by adding a fifth photon. The requirement of a single fifth photon is currently a technical challenge, and thus we consider the approach of using a strongly attenuated weak coherent beam instead.
Major efforts in quantum information science are devoted to the development of methods that are superior to the one of classical information processing, for example the quantum computer or quantum simulations. For these purposes, superposition and entangled states are considered a decisive resource. Furthermore, since the early days of quantum mechanics, entanglement has revealed the discrepancy between the quantum mechanical and the everyday life perception of the physical world. This combination of fundamental science and application-oriented research makes the realization, characterization, and application of entanglement a challenge pursued by many researchers. In this work, the observation of entangled states of polarization encoded photonic qubits is pushed forward in two directions: flexibility in state observation and increase in photon rate. To achieve flexibility two different schemes are developed: setup-based and entanglement-based observation of inequivalent multi-photon states. The setup-based scheme relies on multi-photon interference at a polarizing beam splitter with prior polarization manipulations. It allows the observation of a family of important four-photon entangled states. The entanglement-based scheme exploits the rich properties of Dicke states under particle projections or loss in order to obtain inequivalent multi-photon entangled states. The observed states are characterized using the fidelity and entanglement witnesses. An increase in photon rate is crucial to achieve entanglement of higher photon numbers. This holds especially, when photon sources are utilized that emit photons spontaneously. To this end, a new photon source is presented based on a femtosecond ultraviolet enhancement cavity and applied to the observation of the six-photon Dicke state with three excitations. The implemented schemes not only allow the observation of inequivalent types of entanglement, but also the realization of various quantum information tasks. In this work, the four-photon GHZ state has been used in a quantum simulation of a minimal instance of the toric code. This code enables the demonstration of basic properties of anyons, which are quasiparticles distinct from bosons and fermions. Further, the six-photon Dicke state has been applied for quantum metrology: It allows one to estimate a phase shift with a higher precision than by using only classical resources. Altogether, a whole series of experiments for observing inequivalent multi-photon entangled states can now be substituted by a single experimental setup based on the designs developed in this work. In addition to this new approach of photon processing, a novel photon source has been implemented, paving the way to realizations of applications requiring higher photon numbers.
Entanglement lies at the heart of quantum mechanics and challenged the intuition of physicists ever since it was discovered. At the same time, it is a powerful tool that serves as a key resource for quantum communication and quantum computation schemes. Many of these applications rely on multiparticle entanglement, whose description, generation and manipulation became therefore a very active field in theoretical and experimental quantum information science. The goals are here to classify and understand the different types of entanglement, to find new applications and to control and analyze the quantum states experimentally. In this thesis, the experimental observation and analysis of two different types of four-photon polarization entangled states is presented: The cluster state and the symmetric Dicke state with two excitations. For this purpose, experimental setups based on spontaneous parametric down conversion and linear optics with conditional detection were designed. They allowed to observe the cluster state with a fidelity of 74.1 % and the symmetric Dicke state with a fidelity of 84.4 %. The cluster state experiment included the development of a new instrument that is of interest for linear optics quantum logic in general: A probabilistic controlled phase gate that is, due to the simplification of a previous approach, highly stable and can actually be used in multiphoton experiments. The quality of the gate is evaluated by analyzing its entangling capability and by performing full process tomography. The achieved results demonstrate that this device is well suited for implementation in various multiphoton quantum information protocols. In order to study the observed quantum states, efficient analysis tools are introduced. It was possible to verify that essential properties of the ideal states are indeed reproduced in the experiment, among others, the presence of genuine four-partite entanglement. A particular focus is put on the behavior of the states under projective measurements and photon loss. Several new insights in their entanglement structure are revealed and verified experimentally. We further demonstrate properties that are characteristic for the entanglement classes of the states. These can be used to infer the applicability of the observed states for certain distributed quantum communication applications. The presented experiments are generic for the design of setups to observe cluster- and symmetric Dicke states with a higher number of photons. Furthermore, also the efficient non-tomographic methods for state analysis we employ can directly be generalized to experiments with higher qubit numbers, where the reduction of the experimental effort for state analysis is even more crucial.
We show that for tripartite quantum pure states of qubits, all the kinds of entanglement in terms of stochastic local operations and classical communications classification are experimentally measurable by simple projective measurements, provided that four copies of the composite quantum system are available. In particular, the entanglement of reduced density matrices, even though they are mixed states, can be exactly determined in experiment. Concurrence of assistance is also shown to be measurable by introducing an interesting equation with explicit physical meanings.
Using an inductive approach to classify multipartite entangled states under stochastic local operations and classical communication introduced recently by the authors [Phys. Rev. A 74, 052336 (2006)], we give the complete classification of four-qubit entangled pure states. Apart from the expected degenerate classes, we show that there exist eight inequivalent ways to entangle four qubits. In this respect, permutation symmetry is taken into account and states with a structure differing only by parameters inside a continuous set are considered to belong to the same class.
Abstract In the standard Bell experiment, two parties perform local projective measurements on a shared pair of entangled qubits to generate nonlocal correlations. However, these measurements completely destroy the entanglement, rendering the post-measurement state unable for subsequent use. For a long time, it was believed that only unsharp measurements can be used to share quantum correlations. Remarkably, recent research has shown that classical randomness assisted projective measurements are sufficient for sharing nonlocality (Steffinlongo and Tavakoli 2022 Phys. Rev. Lett. 129 230402). Here, by stochastically combining no more than two different projective measurement strategies, we report an experimental observation of double Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality violations with two measurements in a sequence made on each pair of maximally and partially entangled polarization photons. Our results reveal that the double violation achieved by partially entangled states can be 11 standard deviations larger than that achieved by maximally entangled ones. Our scheme eliminates the requirement for entanglement assistance in previous unsharp-measurement-based sharing schemes, making it experimentally easier. Our work provides possibilities for sharing other types of quantum correlations in various physical systems with projective measurements.