Journal of Modern Optics
Three-photon W-state
Nikolai Kiesel, Mohamed Bourennane, Christian Kurtsiefer, Harald Weinfurter, Dagomir Kaszlikowski, Wiesław Laskowski, Marek Żukowski
Abstract
Multiphoton entanglement is the basis of many quantum communication schemes, quantum cryptographic protocols, and fundamental tests of quantum theory. For entangled three-qubit states it has been shown that there are two inequivalent classes of states, under stochastic local operations and classical communications. The classes are represented by the GHZ- and W-state. The GHZ-state has been used to prove Bell's theorem without inequality. Contrary to the GHZ-state, the W-state shows high robustness of entanglement against photon loss. Here we show the first experimental results on the observation of the polarization entangled three-photon W-state from spontaneous parametric down-conversion.