A few years ago, Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger showed that quantum non locality effects, already well known for systems of two correlated particles, are more spectacular with three particles or more.\\ For observing these effects, one has to initially put the system in an entangled quantum state that is very specific, and not necessarily easy to produce.\\ We discuss some properties of these states and we propose an experimental scheme which allows to create them by succcessive applications of the postulate of measurement in quantum mechanics.\\ The procedure should in principle allow the creation of the desired correlations in systems containing a relatively large number of particles; we propose to apply it to single paramagnetic ions stored in traps, through the measurement of the rotation of the plane of polarization of a laser beam interacting with the ions (quantized Faraday effect).
A few years ago, Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger showed that quantum non locality effects, already well known for systems of two correlated particles, are more spectacular with three particles or more.\ For observing these effects, one has to initially put the system in an entangled quantum state that is very specific, and not necessarily easy to produce.\ We discuss some properties of these states and we propose an experimental scheme which allows to create them by succcessive applications of the postulate of measurement in quantum mechanics.\ The procedure should in principle allow the creation of the desired correlations in systems containing a relatively large number of particles; we propose to apply it to single paramagnetic ions stored in traps, through the measurement of the rotation of the plane of polarization of a laser beam interacting with the ions (quantized Faraday effect).
The pigeonhole principle upholds the idea that by ascribing to three different particles either one of two properties, we necessarily end up in a situation when at least two of the particles have the same property. In quantum physics, this principle is violated in experiments involving postselection of the particles in appropriately-chosen states. Here, we give two explicit constructions using standard gates and measurements that illustrate this fact. Intriguingly, the procedures described are manifestly non-local, which demonstrates that the correlations needed to observe the violation of this principle can be created without direct interactions between particles.
In this chapter, we will discuss the central topic in the current quantum optics studies, that is, entanglement. We focus mostly on the problem of creation of entanglement between two atoms and address the question how one could create multi-atom entangled states. The term entanglement, one of themost intriguing properties of multi-particle systems, was introduced by Schro¨dinger in his discussions of the foundations of quantum mechanics. It describes a multi-particle system that has the astonishing property that the results of a measurement on one particle cannot be specified independently of the results of measurements on the other particles. Although entangled systems can be physically separated, they can no longer be considered as independent, even when they are very far from one another. Entanglement is not only at the heart of the distinction between quantum and classical mechanics, but is now regarded to be a resource central to the development of quantum technologies ranging from quantum information, quantum cryptography, teleportation and quantum computation to atomic and molecular spectroscopy. These practical implementations all stem from the realization that we may control and manipulate quantum systems at the level of single atoms and photons to store information and transfer the information between distant systems in a controlled way and with high fidelity. This field of study is a relatively new one, and considerable research activity is taking place at present. The most active ones are the studies of practical schemes for creation of entanglement between trapped atoms or ions [91, 94].
Summary form only given. Entanglement is one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics and was a source of many debates among the early founders of this theory. More recently, entanglement was considered as one of the key points in the field of quantum information processing. Those potential applications require however the deterministic production of entanglement implying a large number of subsystems. Spontaneous phenomena, generally used to entangle 2 systems, are therefore not easily extendable towards those requirements. Recent works have succeeded in producing entangled state of three or more particles by using spontaneous parametric down-conversion or a unitary operation on a ensemble of trapped ions. We have created an entangled state between two atoms and a mode of the electromagnetic field stored in a cavity. The particles are separated by centimetric distances, which allows for individual addressing. The entangled state is prepared by unitary reversible operations acting on one or two of the particles at the same time. The analysis of the state is performed by detecting correlations between individual observables.
Multi-particle entangled states are becoming more and more interesting for different applications in quantum information, such as quantum multi-particle teleportation, entangled based cryptography and quantum communication schemes based on multi-particle states, but also for fundamental reasons such as testing local realism by means of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states (GHZ) arguments . The advantage of multiparticle entanglement versus the most common two particle one lies in the fact that the greater the number of particles involved in the entangled state, the more clearly the quantum effects are exhibited. Our final goal is to exploit the multi-photon entangled states for quantum metrology. By the interaction of those states with nanostructures (mostly nanoholes, but in a future also nanospheres), we expect to reach sub-wavelength sensitivity phase measurements beating the Standard Quantum Limit as well as to detect plasmonic effects. In this thesis we present our work consisting on designing and building an experimental setup for the generation of states of 4-photon entangled in the transverse linear momentum. In the first part we explain some basics in the form of a technical introduction. We then adapt a general theoretical model to our particular case, explaining the physics of the process of generation of entangled states of photons. We proceed explaining the details of our setup, as well as the procedure of measurement. We then present the results of our tests in a "standard" 2-photon regime to show the correct functioning of the setup itself. Some more sophisticated measurements using structured light in the form of a first-order Hermite-Gaussian mode has been performed to generate entanglement in higher spatial modes are also presented. We conclude with theoretical and experimental details regarding the 4-photon experiments feasible with our setup. Our source is based on Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion (SPDC). In the last two decades it has been extensively studied for the generation of two-photon entangled states, since Kwiat et al. published in 1995 the new scheme based on polarization entangled photons. Most of the studies regarding entangled states involving more than two photons are indeed based on quantum correlations in the polarization or in the path of the down converted beams. The great advantage of entangling a spatial degree of freedom (as we do) is related to the dimensionality of the Hilbert space in which the state is defined. In the particular case of linear momentum, which is a continuous variable, we are dealing with infinite dimensions. Since in each dimension of the state one quanta of information can be encoded, the advantage of having multidimension entanglement for the field of quantum communication and computing is clear. The specs of our setup include a periodically-poled KTP crystals offering high conversion efficiency and cut for type-0 SPDC. The photons generated are well known to be inherently entangled in different degrees of freedom such as polarization, energy-time, linear momentum, and orbital angular momentum. Since each single SPDC event generates one photon pair, in order to reach four photon we entangle two consecutive SPDC events per each state. Furthermore, it is possible to manipulate (to enhance) the dimensionality of the entanglement by properly tailoring the pump spatial profile. The key point for the generation of four-photon entangled states is that, under some conditions, two consecutive pairs generated via SPDC cannot be described as two independent pairs but necessarily as a four-photon state showing genuine entanglement. This can happen when using a pulsed laser to generate the entangled photons; in particular, in the regime in which the coherence time of the down-converted photons τc is (much) longer than the temporal length of the pumping pulse Δt. In this condition the emission of a second pair is stimulated by the presence of the first one. That effect can be ultimately seen as a constructive multi-particle interference effect, the deep origin of which has to be sought in the boson statistic of photons.
Introduction Since its inception, fifty years ago, Bell's theorem has had a long history not only of experimental tests but also of theoretical developments. Studying pairs of correlated quantummechanical particles separated in space, in a composite “entangled” state, Bell [1] showed that the joint ascription of hidden variables and locality to the system led to an inequality that is violated by the predictions of quantum mechanics. Fifteen years later, experiments confirmed the predictions of quantum mechanics, ruling out a large class of local realist theories. One of the most meaningful theoretical developments that followed Bell's work was the Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) theorem, also known as Bell's theorem without inequalities. In 1989, the American physicists Daniel Greenberger and Michael Horne, who had been working on Bell's theorem since the late 1960s, together with the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger, introduced a novelty into the testing of entanglement, extending Bell's theorem in a different and interesting direction. According to Franck Laloë [2], For many years, everyone thought that Bell had basically exhausted the subject by considering all really interesting situations, and that two-spin systems provided the most spectacular quantum violations of local realism. It therefore came as a surprise to many when in 1989 Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger (GHZ) showed that systems containing more than two correlated particles may actually exhibit even more dramatic violations of local realism. The trio analyzed the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen 1935 argument once again and were able to write what are now called Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) entangled states, involving three or four correlated spin-1/2 particles, leading to conflicts between local realist theories and quantum mechanics. However, unlike Bell's theorem, the conflict now was not of a statistical nature, as was the case with Bell's theorem, insofar as measurements on a single GHZ state could lead to conflicting predictions with local realistic models [3–5]. In this paper we present the history of the creation of this theorem and analyze its scope.