Exploiting photonic high-dimensional entanglement allows one to expand the bandwidth of quantum communication and information processing protocols through increased photon information capacity. However, the characterization of entanglement in higher dimensions is experimentally challenging because the number of measurements required scales unfavourably with dimension. While bounds can be used to certify high-dimensional entanglement, they do not quantify the degree to which quantum states are entangled. Here, we propose a quantitative measure that is both an entanglement measure and a dimension witness, which we coin the P-concurrence. We derive this measure by requiring entanglement to extend to qubit subspaces that constitute the high-dimensional state. The computation of the P-concurrence is not contingent on reconstructing the full density matrix, and requires less measurements compared to standard quantum state tomography by orders of magnitude. This allows for faster and more efficient characterization of high-dimensional quantum states.
Exploiting photonic high-dimensional entanglement allows one to expand the bandwidth of quantum communication and information processing protocols through increased photon information capacity. However, the characterization of entanglement in higher dimensions is experimentally challenging because the number of measurements required scales unfavourably with dimension. While bounds can be used to certify high-dimensional entanglement, they do not quantify the degree to which quantum states are entangled. Here, we propose a quantitative measure that is both an entanglement measure and a dimension witness, which we coin the P-concurrence. We derive this measure by requiring entanglement to extend to qubit subspaces that constitute the high-dimensional state. The computation of the P-concurrence is not contingent on reconstructing the full density matrix, and requires less measurements compared to standard quantum state tomography by orders of magnitude. This allows for faster and more efficient characterization of high-dimensional quantum states.
Abstract Entanglement is the powerful and enigmatic resource central to quantum information processing, which promises capabilities in computing, simulation, secure communication, and metrology beyond what is possible for classical devices. Exactly quantifying the entanglement of an unknown system requires completely determining its quantum state, a task which demands an intractable number of measurements even for modestly-sized systems. Here we demonstrate a method for rigorously quantifying high-dimensional entanglement from extremely limited data. We improve an entropic, quantitative entanglement witness to operate directly on compressed experimental data acquired via an adaptive, multilevel sampling procedure. Only 6, 456 measurements are needed to certify an entanglement-of-formation of 7.11 ± .04 ebits shared by two spatially-entangled photons. With a Hilbert space exceeding 68 billion dimensions, we need 20-million-times fewer measurements than the uncompressed approach and 1018-times fewer measurements than tomography. Our technique offers a universal method for quantifying entanglement in any large quantum system shared by two parties.
High-dimensional photonic entanglement holds significant promise for advancing quantum communication, computation, and metrology. For example, large-alphabet quantum communication protocols are known to benefit from enhanced noise resilience and information capacity via multi-bit time-bin encoding. Yet, characterizing high-dimensional entangled states is challenging, as full state tomography becomes prohibitively costly and often requires unrealizable measurements. Here, we demonstrate a scan-free method to characterize high-dimensional entanglement in the time-frequency domain. Our reconstruction achieves a record 5.70±0.07 ebits and a fidelity of 65.4±0.4% with the maximally entangled state of local dimension 1021, certifying the presence of 668-dimensional entanglement. We further prove the attainability of a secure key rate of 15.6 kB/s in a composable finite-size, entanglement-based protocol, and show that in continuous operation, the setup can quickly approach asymptotic key rates. Using commercial telecom components and state-of-the-art low-jitter single-photon detectors, our scalable architecture offers a practical path towards high-rate, noise-resilient quantum communication testbeds.
Quantifying entanglement in a quantum system generally requires a complete quantum tomography followed by the NP-hard computation of an entanglement monotone---requirements that rapidly become intractable at higher dimensions. Observing entanglement in large quantum systems has consequently been relegated to witnesses that only verify its existence. In this article, we show that the violation of recent entropic witnesses of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox also provides tight lower bounds to multiple entanglement measures, such as the entanglement of formation and the distillable entanglement, among others. Our approach only requires the measurement of correlations between two pairs of complementary observables---not a tomography---so it scales efficiently at high dimension. Despite this, our technique captures almost all the entanglement in common high-dimensional quantum systems, such as spatially or temporally entangled photons from parametric down-conversion.
Abstract Entanglement is the powerful and enigmatic resource central to quantum information processing, which promises capabilities in computing, simulation, secure communication, and metrology beyond what is possible for classical devices. Exactly quantifying the entanglement of an unknown system requires completely determining its quantum state, a task which demands an intractable number of measurements even for modestly-sized systems. Here we demonstrate a method for rigorously quantifying high-dimensional entanglement from extremely limited data. We improve an entropic, quantitative entanglement witness to operate directly on compressed experimental data acquired via an adaptive, multilevel sampling procedure. Only 6,456 measurements are needed to certify an entanglement-of-formation of 7.11 ± .04 ebits shared by two spatially-entangled photons. With a Hilbert space exceeding 68 billion dimensions, we need 20-million-times fewer measurements than the uncompressed approach and 1018-times fewer measurements than tomography. Our technique offers a universal method for quantifying entanglement in any large quantum system shared by two parties.
Entanglement is the powerful and enigmatic resource central to quantum information processing, which promises capabilities in computing, simulation, secure communication, and metrology beyond what is possible for classical devices. Achieving a quantum advantage requires scaling quantum systems to sizes that can support a large amount of entanglement. Because real-world systems are varied and imperfect, the quantum resources they provide must be characterized before use. However, exactly quantifying the entanglement of an unknown system requires completely determining its quantum state, a task which requires an intractable number of measurements even for modestly sized systems. Here we demonstrate a new method for rigorously quantifying high-dimensional entanglement from extremely limited data. We improve an entropic, quantitative entanglement witness to operate directly on compressed experimental data acquired via an adaptive, multilevel sampling procedure. Only 6,456 measurements are needed to certify an entanglement-of-formation of 7.11±.04 ebits shared between spatially-entangled photon pairs. With a Hilbert space exceeding 68 billion dimensions, this is 10-million-fold fewer measurements than traditional approaches. The procedure does not computationally recover an underlying state and allows straightforward error analysis. Our technique offers a universal method for quantifying entanglement in any large quantum system shared by two parties.
High-dimensional entangled states are promising candidates for increasing the security and encoding capacity of quantum systems. While it is possible to witness and set bounds for the entanglement, precisely quantifying the dimensionality and purity in a fast and accurate manner remains an open challenge. Here, we report an approach that simultaneously returns the dimensionality and purity of high-dimensional entangled states by simple projective measurements. We show that the outcome of a conditional measurement returns a visibility that scales monotonically with state dimensionality and purity, allowing for quantitative measurements for general photonic quantum systems. We illustrate our method using two separate bases, the orbital angular momentum and pixels bases, and quantify the state dimensionality by a variety of definitions over a wide range of noise levels, highlighting its usefulness in practical situations. Importantly, the number of measurements needed in our approach scale linearly with dimensions, reducing data acquisition time significantly. Our technique provides a simple, fast and direct measurement approach.