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Physical Review A

Tomography of the quantum state of photons entangled in high dimensions

Megan Agnew, Jonathan Leach, Melanie G. McLaren, F. Stef Roux, Robert W. Boyd

Published Dec 2, 2011• 163 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Systems entangled in high dimensions have recently been proposed as important tools for various quantum information protocols, such as multibit quantum key distribution and loophole-free tests of nonlocality. It is therefore important to have precise knowledge of the nature of such entangled quantum states. We tomographically reconstruct the quantum state of the two photons produced by parametric downconversion that are entangled in a $d$-dimensional orbital angular momentum basis. We determine exactly the density matrix of the entangled two-qu$d$it state with $d$ ranging from 2 to 8. The recording of higher-dimensional states is limited only by the number of data points required and therefore the length of time needed to complete the measurements. We find all the measured states to have fidelities and linear entropies that satisfy the criteria required for a violation of the appropriate high-dimensional Bell inequality. Our results therefore precisely characterize the nature of the entanglement, thus establishing the suitability of such states for applications in quantum information science.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.062101

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Systems entangled in high dimensions have recently been proposed as important tools for various quantum information protocols, such as multibit quantum key distribution and loophole-free tests of nonlocality. It is therefore important to have precise knowledge of the nature of such entangled quantum states. We tomographically reconstruct the quantum state of the two photons produced by parametric downconversion that are entangled in a ddd-dimensional orbital angular momentum basis. We determine exactly the density matrix of the entangled two-qudddit state with ddd ranging from 2 to 8. The recording of higher-dimensional states is limited only by the number of data points required and therefore the length of time needed to complete the measurements. We find all the measured states to have fidelities and linear entropies that satisfy the criteria required for a violation of the appropriate high-dimensional Bell inequality. Our results therefore precisely characterize the nature of the entanglement, thus establishing the suitability of such states for applications in quantum information science.
We report a high fidelity tomographic reconstruction of the quantum state of photon pairs generated by parametric down-conversion with orbital angular momentum (OAM) entanglement. Our tomography method allows us to estimate an upper and lower bound for the entanglement between the down-converted photons. We investigate the two-dimensional state subspace defined by the OAM states ±ℓ and superpositions thereof, with ℓ=1, 2, ..., 30. We find that the reconstructed density matrix, even for OAMs up to around ℓ=20, is close to that of a maximally entangled Bell state with a fidelity in the range between F =0.979 and F =0.814. This demonstrates that, although the single count-rate diminishes with increasing ℓ, entanglement persists in a large dimensional state space.
High-dimensional (HD) entanglement enables an encoding of more bits than in the two-dimensional case and promises to increase communication capacity over quantum channels and to improve robustness to noise. In practice, however, one of the central challenges is to devise efficient methods to quantify the HD entanglement explicitly. Full quantum state tomography is a standard technology to obtain all the information about the quantum state, but it becomes impractical because the required measurements increase exponentially with the dimension in HD systems. Hence, it is highly anticipated that a new method will be found for characterizing the HD entanglement with as few measurements as possible and without introducing unwarranted assumptions. Here, we present and demonstrate a scan-free tomography method independent of dimension, which only requires two measurements for the characterization of two-photon HD orbital angular momentum (OAM) entanglement. Taking Laguerre-Gaussian modes of photons as an example, the density matrices of OAM entangled states are experimentally reconstructed with very high fidelity. Our method is also generalized to the mixed HD OAM entanglement. Our results provide realistic approaches for quantifying more complex OAM entanglement in many scientific and engineering fields such as multiphoton HD quantum systems and quantum process tomography.
Measurements in mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) are integral to quantum science. An underlying principle of a set of MUBs is that a measurement in one such basis provides no information about a measurement in one of the others. This feature is especially relevant for quantum key distribution. We perform a complete set of mutually unbiased measurements for high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) states of light. For a two-photon entangled state we show that specific joint measurements provide the minimum number of experimental settings required to characterize the quantum state. From these measurements we reconstruct the density matrix describing the high-dimensional two-photon entangled state. The experimental procedure that we outline can be applied to many different multipartite and high-dimensional systems.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is an essential tool for characterizing an unknown quantum state. Recently, QST has been performed for entangled qudits based on orbital angular momentum, time-energy uncertainty, and frequency bins. Here, we propose a QST for time-bin qudits, with which the number of measurement settings scales linearly with dimension d . Using the proposed scheme, we performed QST for a four-dimensional time-bin maximally entangled state with 16 measurement settings. We successfully reconstructed the density matrix of the entangled qudits, with which the average fidelity of the state was calculated to be 0.950.
Accurately establishing the state of large-scale quantum systems is an important tool in quantum information science; however, the large number of unknown parameters hinders the rapid characterisation of such states, and reconstruction procedures can become prohibitively time-consuming. Compressive sensing, a procedure for solving inverse problems by incorporating prior knowledge about the form of the solution, provides an attractive alternative to the problem of high-dimensional quantum state characterisation. Using a modified version of compressive sensing that incorporates the principles of singular value thresholding, we reconstruct the density matrix of a high-dimensional two-photon entangled system. The dimension of each photon is equal to d = 17, corresponding to a system of 83521 unknown real parameters. Accurate reconstruction is achieved with approximately 2500 measurements, only 3% of the total number of unknown parameters in the state. The algorithm we develop is fast, computationally inexpensive, and applicable to a wide range of quantum states, thus demonstrating compressive sensing as an effective technique for measuring the state of large-scale quantum systems.