Over the last twenty years the field of quantum information processing (QIP) has attracted the attention of many scientists, due to the promise of impressive improvements in the areas of computational speed, communication security and the ability to simulate nature on the micro scale. This thesis describes an experimental work on the physics of multi-photon entanglement and its application in the field of QIP. We have thoroughly developed the necessary techniques to generate multipartite entanglement between up to six photons. By exploiting the developed six-photon interferometer, in this thesis we report for the first time the experimental quantum teleportation of a two-qubit composite system, the realization of multi-stage entanglement swapping, the implementation of a teleportation-based controlled-NOT gate for fault-tolerant quantum computation, the first generation of entanglement in sixpartite photonic graph states and the realization of ‘one-way’ quantum computation with two-photon four-qubit cluster states. The methods developed in these experiments are of great significance both for exploring the field of QIP and for future experiments on the fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.
Over the last twenty years the field of quantum information processing (QIP) has attracted the attention of many scientists, due to the promise of impressive improvements in the areas of computational speed, communication security and the ability to simulate nature on the micro scale. This thesis describes an experimental work on the physics of multi-photon entanglement and its application in the field of QIP. We have thoroughly developed the necessary techniques to generate multipartite entanglement between up to six photons. By exploiting the developed six-photon interferometer, in this thesis we report for the first time the experimental quantum teleportation of a two-qubit composite system, the realization of multi-stage entanglement swapping, the implementation of a teleportation-based controlled-NOT gate for fault-tolerant quantum computation, the first generation of entanglement in sixpartite photonic graph states and the realization of ‘one-way’ quantum computation with two-photon four-qubit cluster states. The methods developed in these experiments are of great significance both for exploring the field of QIP and for future experiments on the fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.
Quantum information has been witnessing great science value and latent application since 1980's. The research work presented here consist of mainly two important parts: manipulations of multiphoton entanglement and atomic ensembles based quantum memory. In first part, the experimental technique multi-photon entanglement is further developed to study fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, remarkable applications to quantum communication and quantum computation. Specifically, we have demonstrated a bit-flip error-free transfer of quantum information, violation of Bell's inequality beyond Tsirelson's bound, teleportation of a two-qubit composite system, as well as the one-way computing by two-photon-four-qubit cluster state. To overcome un-scalability problem due to probabilistic feature in linear optical quantum information processing, we investigated in the second part the physics of atomic ensembles based quantum memory. We show that theoretically, entanglement between distant locations can be deterministically generated. The experimental work has thoroughly developed the necessary techniques and we have achieved deterministic single photon source, and interference of the photons from independent atomic ensembles, teleportation between photonic and atomic qubits, a novel way to create a robust entanglement between an atomic and a photonic qubit, and memory based entanglement swapping. We believe, the developed techniques here would dramatically facilitate progresses in many fields including global quantum communication, linear optical quantum computation and the foundations of quantum mechanics etc.
Since the awareness of entanglement was raised by Einstein, Podolski, Rosen and Schrödinger in the beginning of the last century, it took almost 55 years until entanglement entered the laboratories as a new resource. Meanwhile, entangled states of various quantum systems have been investigated. Sofar, their biggest variety was observed in photonic qubit systems. Thereby, the setups of today's experiments on multi-photon entanglement can all be structured in the following way: They consist of a photon source, a linear optics network by which the photons are processed and the conditional detection of the photons at the output of the network. In this thesis, two new linear optics networks are introduced and their application for several quantum information tasks is presented. The workhorse of multi-photon quantum information, spontaneous parametric down conversion, is used in different configurations to provide the input states for the networks. The first network is a new design of a controlled phase gate which is particularly interesting for applications in multi-photon experiments as it constitutes an improvement of former realizations with respect to stability and reliability. This is explicitly demonstrated by employing the gate in four-photon experiments. In this context, a teleportation and entanglement swapping protocol is performed in which all four Bell states are distinguished by means of the phase gate. A similar type of measurement applied to the subsystem parts of two copies of a quantum state, allows further the direct estimation of the state's entanglement in terms of its concurrence. Finally, starting from two Bell states, the controlled phase gate is applied for the observation of a four photon cluster state. The analysis of the results focuses on measurement based quantum computation, the main usage of cluster states. The second network, fed with the second order emission of non-collinear type II spontaneous parametric down conversion, constitutes a tunable source of a whole family of states. Up to now the observation of one particular state required one individually tailored setup. With the network introduced here many different states can be obtained within the same arrangement by tuning a single, easily accessible experimental parameter. These states exhibit many useful properties and play a central role in several applications of quantum information. Here, they are used for the solution of a four-player quantum Minority game. It is shown that, by employing four-qubit entanglement, the quantum version of the game clearly outperforms its classical counterpart. Experimental data obtained with both networks are utilized to demonstrate a new method for the experimental discrimination of different multi-partite entangled states. Although theoretical classifications of four-qubit entangled states exist, sofar there was no experimental tool to easily assign an observed state to the one or the other class. The new tool presented here is based on operators which are formed by the correlations between local measurement settings that are typical for the respective quantum state.
In this talk I shall present a brief overview on some recent exciting experimental progress towards scalable quantum information processing (QIP), e.g., quantum communication, quantum computation and quantum simulation, via manipulation of photonic qubits. Building on our long experience in research on multi-photon entanglement, we are working on a number of experiments in the field of QIP with particular emphasis on linear optical quantum computation and free space quantum communication. It is foreseen that with ongoing development, quantum communication over 1000 km scale and coherent quantum manipulation of up to a few tens photonic qubits shall be feasible in the next five years.
Quantum information science and atom optics are among the most active fields in modem physics. In recent years, many theoretical efforts have been made to combine these two fields. Recent experimental progresses [1-3] have shown the in-principle possibility to perform scalable quantum information processing (QIP) with linear optics and atomic ensembles [4]. One of our main activities is to use atomic qubits as quantum memory and exploit photonic qubits for information transfer and processing to achieve efficient linear optics QIP. On the one hand, utilizing the interaction between laser pulses and atomic ensembles we experimentally investigate the potentials of atomic ensembles in the gas phase to build quantum repeaters for longdistance quantum communication [5], that is, to develop a new technological solution for quantum repeaters making use of the effective qubit-type entanglement of two cold atomic ensembles by a projective measurement of individual photons by spontaneous Raman processes. On the other hand, building on our long experience in research on multi-photon entanglement, we are also working on a number of experiments in the field of QIP with particular emphasis on fault-tolerant quantum computation [6], photon-loss-tolerant quantum computation [7] and cluster-state based quantum simulation [8]. In future, by combining the techniques developed in the above quantum memory and multi-photon interference experiments, we will experimentally investigate the possibility to achieve quantum teleportation between photonic and atomic qubits, quantum teleportation between remote atomic qubits and efficient entanglement generation via classical feed-forward. The techniques that are being developed will lay the basis for future large-scale realizations of linear optical QIP with atoms and photons.
Quantum information science and atom optics are among the most active fields in modern physics. One of our main activities is to use atomic qubits as quantum memory and exploit photonic qubits for information transfer and processing to achieve efficient linear optics quantum information processing (QIP). On the one hand, utilizing the interaction between laser pulses and ultra-cold atomic ensembles we experimentally investigate the potentials of atomic ensembles in the gas phase to build quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communication, that is, to develop a new technological solution for quantum repeaters making use of the effective qubit-type entanglement of two cold atomic ensembles by a projective measurement of individual photons by spontaneous Raman processes. On the other hand, building on our long experience in research on multi-photon entanglement, The techniques that are being developed will lay the basis for future large-scale realizations of linear optical QIP with atoms and photons.
In recent years, there has been heightened interest in quantum teleportation, which allows for the transfer of unknown quantum states over arbitrary distances. Quantum teleportation not only serves as an essential ingredient in long-distance quantum communication, but also provides enabling technologies for practical quantum computation. Of particular interest is the scheme proposed by D. Gottesman and I. L. Chuang [(1999) Nature 402:390-393], showing that quantum gates can be implemented by teleporting qubits with the help of some special entangled states. Therefore, the construction of a quantum computer can be simply based on some multiparticle entangled states, Bell-state measurements, and single-qubit operations. The feasibility of this scheme relaxes experimental constraints on realizing universal quantum computation. Using two different methods, we demonstrate the smallest nontrivial module in such a scheme--a teleportation-based quantum entangling gate for two different photonic qubits. One uses a high-fidelity six-photon interferometer to realize controlled-NOT gates, and the other uses four-photon hyperentanglement to realize controlled-Phase gates. The results clearly demonstrate the working principles and the entangling capability of the gates. Our experiment represents an important step toward the realization of practical quantum computers and could lead to many further applications in linear optics quantum information processing.