We report the successful experimental exploration of the full transverse-mode space of spatially entangled photons, azimuthal and radial; and investigate theoretically and experimentally the subtle relation to the Schmidt eigenmodes of the downconverted twin photons.
Spatially entangled twin photons allow the study of high-dimensional entanglement, and the Laguerre-Gauss modes are the most commonly used basis to discretize the single-photon mode spaces. In this basis, to date only the azimuthal degree of freedom has been investigated experimentally due to its fundamental and experimental simplicity. We show that the full spatial entanglement is indeed accessible experimentally; i.e., we have found practicable radial detection modes with negligible cross correlations. This allows us to demonstrate hybrid azimuthal-radial quantum correlations in a Hilbert space with more than 100 dimensions per photon.
High-dimensional spatially entangled two-photon state generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion process (SPDC) has become a promising resource for several quantum information science applications. For harnessing high-dimensional entanglement advantages, detection capability in the Schmidt basis is a necessity. Spatial entanglement has been explored in several modal bases, such as pixel, azimuthal, and radial modes. Among them, pixel and azimuthal entanglement have been widely utilized due to efficient access to their Schmidt modes, while radial-mode entanglement remains underexploited. This is because for radial coordinates, there is neither a Schmidt-decomposed form for the SPDC photons nor is there a technique for measuring high-dimensional radial Schmidt modes, which is a major roadblock in harnessing radial mode advantages. In this work, we first theoretically show that the azimuthal averaging of SPDC two-photon state yields a radial Schmidt-decomposed form under typical experimental situations. We then demonstrate an innovative approach for extracting the radial Schmidt modes and their spectrum by characterizing the density matrix in the radial basis of one of the SPDC photons. Finally, we report the first-ever measurement of radial Schmidt spectrum of upto 50 radial Schmidt modes with about 98\% fidelity.
We put forward an approach to estimate the amount of bipartite spatial entanglement of down-converted photon states correlated in orbital angular momentum and the magnitude of the transverse (radial) wave vectors. Both degrees of freedom are properly considered in our framework, which only requires azimuthal local linear optical transformations and mode selection analysis with two fiber detectors. The coincidence distributions predicted by our approach give an excellent fit to the distributions measured in a recent experiment aimed to show the very high-dimensional transverse entanglement of twin photons from a down-conversion source. Our estimate for the Schmidt number is substantially lower but still confirms the presence of high-dimensional entanglement.
Abstract High-dimensional spatially entangled two-photon states generated by the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process (SPDC) have become a promising resource for several quantum information science applications. In order to harness high-dimensional entanglement advantages, detection capability in the Schmidt basis is a necessity. Spatial entanglement has been explored in several modal bases, such as pixel, azimuthal, and radial modes. Among them, pixel and azimuthal entanglement have been widely utilized due to efficient access to their Schmidt modes, while radial-mode entanglement remains underexploited. This is due to radial coordinates not having a Schmidt-decomposed form for the SPDC photons or a technique for measuring high-dimensional radial Schmidt modes, which is a major roadblock in harnessing radial mode advantages. In this work, we first theoretically show that azimuthal averaging of SPDC two-photon states yields a radial Schmidt-decomposed form under typical experimental situations. We then demonstrate an innovative approach for extracting the radial Schmidt modes and their spectrum by characterizing the density matrix in the radial basis of one of the SPDC photons. Finally, we report the first-ever measurement of the radial Schmidt spectrum of up to 50 radial Schmidt modes with about 98% fidelity.
Orthogonal sets of 2D transverse modes are key to controlling the spatial degree of freedom of light in a classical or quantum context. In contrast to the azimuthal part, which is easily accessible using orbital angular momentum modes, control of the radial part is more difficult. We show here that simple sets of orthogonal binary sequences, the Walsh functions, provide a workable solution for exploration of the radial space with phase-only spatial light modulation. We demonstrate this by measuring "sequency" quantum correlations between different radial Walsh modes of spatially entangled photon pairs and for numerically optimized versions thereof.