Experimental observation of photonic multipartite entanglement

G. H. Aguilar, Andrea Valdés-Hernández, L. Davidovich +2 more

When an initially entangled pair of qubits undergoes local decoherence processes, there are a number of ways in which the original entanglement can spread throughout the multipartite system consisting of the two qubits and their environments. Here, we report theoretical and experimental results regarding the dynamics of the distribution of entanglement in this system. The experiment employs an all optical setup in which the qubits are encoded in the polarization degrees of freedom of two photons, and each local decoherence channel is implemented with an interferometer that couples the polarization to the path of each photon, which acts as an environment. We monitor the dynamics and distribution of entanglement and observe the transition from bipartite to multipartite entanglement and back, and show how these transitions are intimately related to the sudden death and sudden birth of entanglement. The multipartite entanglement is further analyzed in terms of three- and four-partite entanglement contributions, and genuine four-qubit entanglement is observed at some points of the evolution.

F. J. Duarte

Patrik Caspar, Enky Oudot, Pavel Sekatski +5 more

How can a multipartite single-photon path-entangled state be certified efficiently by means of local measurements? We address this question by constructing an entanglement witness based on local photon detections preceded by displacement operations to reveal genuine multipartite entanglement. Our witness is defined as a sum of three observables that can be measured locally and assessed with two measurement settings for any number of parties N . For any bipartition, the maximum mean value of the witness observable over biseparable states is bounded by the maximum eigenvalue of an N×N matrix, which can be computed efficiently. We demonstrate the applicability of our scheme by experimentally testing the witness for heralded 4- and 8-partite single-photon path-entangled states. Our implementation shows the scalability of our witness and opens the door for distributing photonic multipartite entanglement in quantum networks at high rates.

F.J. Duarte

Aditya N. Sharma, Kevin T. McCusker, Julio T. Barreiro +1 more

We present an experimental study of multipartite entanglement using hyperentangled photon pairs. We first demonstrate some interesting properties of the bound-entangled “Smolin state” and then discuss further studies using this source.