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arXiv:1402.2781 · Physical Review Letters

Ancilla-Assisted Measurement of Photonic Spatial Correlations and Entanglement

Malena O. Hor-Meyll, J. O. de Almeida, Gabriela Barreto Lemos, P. H. Souto Ribeiro, Stephen Patrick Walborn

Published Feb 6, 2014• 17 citations
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Abstract

We report an experiment in which the moments of spatial coordinates are measured in down-converted photons directly, without having to reconstruct any marginal probability distributions. We use a spatial light modulator to couple the spatial degrees of freedom and the polarization of the fields, which acts as an ancilla system. Information about the spatial correlations is obtained via measurements on the ancilla qubit. Among other applications, this new method provides a more efficient technique to identify continuous variable entanglement.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.112.053602

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We report an experiment in which the moments of spatial coordinates are measured in down-converted photons directly, without having to reconstruct any marginal probability distributions. We use a spatial light modulator to couple the spatial degrees of freedom and the polarization of the fields, which acts as an ancilla system. Information about the spatial correlations is obtained via measurements on the ancilla qubit. Among other applications, this new method provides a more efficient technique to identify continuous variable entanglement.
We propose an interferometric method for the direct measurement of the moments of the transverse spatial variables of an optical field. The key elements are spatial light modulators, used to imprint a transverse phase on the field. We show that our measurement scheme can be used to measure the spatial correlation functions of a two-photon state directly, which allows for the identification of spatial entanglement without the need for partial state reconstruction. Our method can also be extended to NNN-photon states. We show that the method is more efficient than the measurement of marginal probability distributions, and that it can be made resilient to small alignment errors.
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In this work we performed two experiments to observe the fractional topological phases in two qudits photonic systems. The qudits are encoded in the transverse position degree of freedom of photon pairs generated by the spontaneous parametric down conversion after being transmitted through multiple slits. The photons in this phenomenon are quantum correlated in momentum and energy. Initially we review the theory about the origin of the phases acquired by the evolving quantum states of one and two qubits, where we identify the dynamic, the geometric and the topological phases. Then we examine the generalization of topological phases for two qudits, and discuss its relation with the concept of connectedness of a space. Next we show a way to measure the topological phase, considering that it must appear as a relative phase between two interfering quantum states. To realize the measurement we build an optical interferometer with a spatial light modulator inside it to implement the necessary unitary operations. The polarization is used as an auxiliary degree of freedom for the operations to act conditionally. The results are close to the theoretical predictions, showing the dependence of the phase with the Hilbert space dimension of the state. In a second setup we measure the topological phase for qudits without using a longitudinal interferometer. A new source of polarization entangled photon pairs is used in this new setup. The entanglement in the auxiliary degree of freedom, polarization, is used as a resource to eliminate the interferometer, propitiating a significant improvement in the visibility of the measured interference curves, and a large increase in the signal to noise ratio. In this new setup, we are also capable of realize the unitary operations in both parts of the two qubit system.
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A complete characterization of entanglement in a two-qutrit state generated using the transverse spatial correlations of two parametric down-converted photons is discussed. We verify entanglement for a particular case via entanglement witness operators which are decomposed into a sum of local observables. Experimentally, these operators are accomplished by using a spatial light modulator and a polarizing beam splitter. The quantification of entanglement is computed by the negativity. We also realize an experiment for the verification of the Schmidt number of quantum correlated photons. This measure of entanglement counts the number of global superpositions of product states which are needed to describe a compound quantum system. For unraveling a certain value of this measure, a family of entanglement and Schmidt number tests is constructed.