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American Journal of Physics

Witnessing entanglement in an undergraduate laboratory

Marisol N. Beck, M. Beck

Published Jan 21, 2016• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An entangled state of a two-particle system is a quantum state that cannot be separated, meaning it cannot be written as the product of states of the individual particles. One way to tell if a system is entangled is to use it to violate a Bell inequality (such as the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, CHSH, inequality), because entanglement is necessary for such a violation. However, there are other, easier-to-perform measurements that determine whether or not a system is entangled. An operator that corresponds to such a measurement is referred to as an entanglement witness. Here, we present the theory of witness operators and an undergraduate experiment that measures entanglement witnesses for the joint polarization state of two photons. We are able to produce states for which the expectation value of a witness operator is entangled by more than 300 standard deviations. In order to further examine the performance of these witness operators, we present a simple way to generate states that closely approximate Werner states, which have a controllable degree of entanglement.

DOI
10.1119/1.4936623

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An entangled state of a two-particle system is a quantum state that cannot be separated, meaning it cannot be written as the product of states of the individual particles. One way to tell if a system is entangled is to use it to violate a Bell inequality (such as the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, CHSH, inequality), because entanglement is necessary for such a violation. However, there are other, easier-to-perform measurements that determine whether or not a system is entangled. An operator that corresponds to such a measurement is referred to as an entanglement witness. Here, we present the theory of witness operators and an undergraduate experiment that measures entanglement witnesses for the joint polarization state of two photons. We are able to produce states for which the expectation value of a witness operator is entangled by more than 300 standard deviations. In order to further examine the performance of these witness operators, we present a simple way to generate states that closely approximate Werner states, which have a controllable degree of entanglement.
An entangled state of a two-particle system is a quantum state that cannot be separated-it cannot be written as the product of states of the individual particles.One way to tell if a system is entangled is to use it to violate a Bell inequality (such as the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, CHSH, inequality), because entanglement is necessary to violate these inequalities.However, there are other, more efficient measurements that determine whether or not a system is entangled; an operator that corresponds to such a measurement is referred to as an entanglement witness.We present the theory of witness operators, and an undergraduate experiment that measures an entanglement witness for the joint polarization state of two photons.We are able to produce states for which the expectation value of the witness operator is entangled by more than 160 standard deviations.
The assumption of local realism imposes constraints, such as Bell inequalities, on quantities obtained from measurements. In recent years, various tests of local realism have gained popularity in undergraduate laboratories, giving students the exciting opportunity to experimentally contradict this philosophical assumption. The standard test of the CHSH (Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt) Bell inequality requires 16 measurements, whereas a test of Freedman's inequality requires only three measurements. The calculations required to test Freedman's inequality are correspondingly simpler and the theory is less abstract. We suggest that students may benefit from testing Freedman's inequality before proceeding to the CHSH inequality and other more complicated experiments. Our measured data violated Freedman's inequality by more than six standard deviations.
Entanglement is a central concept in quantum information and a key resource for many quantum protocols. In this work we propose and analyze a class of entanglement witnesses that detect the presence of entanglement in subsystems of experimental multiqubit stabilizer states. The witnesses we propose can be decomposed into sums of Pauli operators and can be efficiently evaluated by either two measurement settings only or at most a number of measurements that only depends on the size of the subsystem of interest. We provide two constructive methods to design the local witness operators, the first one based on the local unitary equivalence between graph and stabilizer states, and the second one based on sufficient and necessary conditions that the respective set of constituent Pauli operators needs to fulfill. We theoretically establish the noise tolerance of the proposed witnesses and benchmark their practical performance by analyzing the local entanglement structure of an experimental seven-qubit quantum error correction code.
In a future quantum network, two spatially separated individuals sharing a polarization entanglement source may need to assess the entanglement quality of the source without the presence of classical auxiliary signals. When the two are separated by a single-mode fiber, automated methods are necessary for the validation and estimation of polarization entanglement. We experimentally examine real-time iterative methods to search for maximal Bell violations, specifically the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) inequality, between two observers sharing polarization entangled photons to evaluate the entanglement quality of the source. Our source allows us to tune the degree of entanglement of their shared photon pair by changing the temporal overlap of the two photons at an entangling 50/50 beam splitter so that we can compare the CHSH parameter these methods find to the theoretical values our source produces. The iterative methods used within our experiment are the Nelder–Mead optimization method, stochastic gradient descent, and Bayesian optimization. This is the first feedback experiment to study automated Bell violations in fiber and the first to compare all three of these iterative methods to one another in a quantum polarization control experiment. In our experiment, all methods are able to find Bell violations, but the Nelder–Mead method performed the best in terms of the speed and accuracy in finding the maximal violation.
Quantum mechanics predicts the existence of correlations between composite systems that, although puzzling to our physical intuition, enable technologies not accessible in a classical world. Notwithstanding, there is still no efficient general method to theoretically quantify and experimentally detect entanglement of many qubits. Here we propose to detect entanglement by measuring the statistical response of a quantum system to an arbitrary nonlocal parametric evolution. We witness entanglement without relying on the tomographic reconstruction of the quantum state, or the realization of witness operators. The protocol requires two collective settings for any number of parties and is robust against noise and decoherence occurring after the implementation of the parametric transformation. To illustrate its user friendliness we demonstrate multipartite entanglement in different experiments with ions and photons by analyzing published data on fidelity visibilities and variances of collective observables.
Linearly polarized projections are the tacit means for performing Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell-inequality tests using polarization-entangled photon pairs. The inequality is valid for all states on the Poincaré-Bloch sphere, but few laboratory studies have investigated violations with the full sphere. In this article, we explore the experimental verifications of the predicted violations of the CHSH inequality with Bell and non-Bell states with same and different linear and elliptically polarized basis states for each photon. We find that Bell states violate CHSH when using the same basis for both photons, regardless of their ellipticity, whereas they show no violations for photon projections in different bases. We found non-Bell maximally-entangled states for which the converse is true.