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Physical Review A

Postselection-free energy-time entanglement

Dmitry Strekalov, T. B. Pittman, Alexander V. Sergienko, Yanhua H. Shih, Paul G. Kwiat

Published Jul 1, 1996• 119 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report a two-photon interference experiment that realizes a postselection-free test of Bell's inequality based on energy-time entanglement. In contrast with all previous experiments of this type, the employed entangled states are obtained without the use of a beam splitter or a short coincidence window to "throw away" unwanted amplitudes. A (95.0\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1.4)% interference fringe visibility is observed, implying a strong violation of the Bell inequality. The scheme is very compact and has demonstrated excellent stability, suggesting that it may be useful, for example, in practical quantum cryptography.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.54.r1

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We have performed an EPR-type experiment first proposed by Franson,1 resulting in two-particle interference that is both nonclassical and nonlocal. We used photon pairs produced in an entangled state of energy via spontaneous down-conversion. Each photon enters an unbalanced interferometer, and we detect singles and coincidence rates at the output ports. If the long- and short-arm path-length difference is much greater than the photons’ coherence lengths, no fringes are seen in singles as the arm lengths are varied. Yet when the difference between the path-length differences of the two interferometers is less than these coherence lengths, fringes are observed in coincidence, resulting from an interference of the (indistinguishable) “long–long” and “short–short" coincidence possibilities. If the electronic resolution is sufficient to eliminate the background of "short–long" and "long–short” coincidences, the visibility may be as high as 100%.2 For V > 71%, with certain reasonable auxiliary assumptions, Bell’s inequalities can be violated. The interpretation is that no local, realistic model can yield the observed results. The use of this type of entangled state is significant because it is much closer to the original EPR paradox than the spin-singlet case commonly considered.
We report a violation of Bell's inequality using one photon from a parametric down-conversion source and a second photon from an attenuated laser beam. The two photons were entangled at a beam splitter using the postselection technique of Shih and Alley [Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 2921 (1988)]]. A quantum interference pattern with a visibility of 91% was obtained using the photons from these independent sources, as compared with a visibility of 99.4% using two photons from a central parametric down-conversion source.
Simultaneous entanglement in spin and space-time of a two-photon quantum state generated in type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion is demonstrated by the observation of quantum interference with 98% visibility in simple beam-splitter (Hanburry Brown-Twiss) anticorrelation and quantum beating experiments. The cancellation of two-photon probability amplitudes as a result of this double entanglement allow us to demonstrate two different types of Bell's inequality violations in one experimental setup.
Entanglement is an invaluable resource for fundamental tests of physics and the implementation of quantum information protocols such as device-independent secure communications. In particular, time-bin entanglement is widely exploited to reach these purposes both in free space and optical fiber propagation, due to the robustness and simplicity of its implementation. However, all existing realizations of time-bin entanglement suffer from an intrinsic postselection loophole, which undermines their usefulness. Here, we report the first experimental violation of Bell's inequality with "genuine" time-bin entanglement, free of the postselection loophole. We introduced a novel function of the interferometers at the two measurement stations, that operate as fast synchronized optical switches. This scheme allowed us to obtain a postselection-loophole-free Bell violation of more than 9 standard deviations. Since our scheme is fully implementable using standard fiber-based components and is compatible with modern integrated photonics, our results pave the way for the distribution of genuine time-bin entanglement over long distances.