Qubit propagation under atmospheric turbulences

Keith A. Wyman, Robert J. Von-Holle, Milo Wilt Hyde IV +1 more

To study the effects of atmospheric turbulence on the quality of entanglement of photons propagating from a ground station to a satellite and to verify if coincidence measurements of entangled photons can be used to back out atmospheric turbulence parameters for long-distance propagation or moderate-to-strong turbulence , we built an atmospheric turbulence simulator (ATS) in a laboratory setting. The ATS comprised of two afocal systems with a Lexitek phase wheel and a Meadowlark spatial light modulator representing discrete layers of atmospheric turbulence. The ATS could represent propagation distances on the order of 1km and could theoretically simulate Rytov variances as high as 5.16 and Fried parameters as low as 0.5cm for a 1m telescope. The design parameters, numerical simulations, and experimental setup is detailed in this proceeding.

Joseph D. Fasone, Mikaela Morris, Keith A. Wyman +1 more

聂敏 Nie Min, 高 锟 Gao Kun, 杨光 YANG Guang +2 more

Keith A. Wyman, Milo Wilt Hyde IV, Anil K. Patnaik

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) is building a quantum optics and quantum information laboratory to study single photon phenomena and its applications. We propose an experiment to characterize the effects of atmospheric turbulence on single photons and entangled pair of photons as a function of statistical quantities that define a turbulent atmosphere (such as the Fried parameter, Greenwood frequency, Rytov variance, ect).This presentation details the initial experiment studying single photon propagation using an atmospheric turbulence simulator that statistically represents ground-to-space quantum communications.

Koji Fukagata

Filippus Stefanus Roux

We derive a first-order differential equation for the decoherence of an orbital angular momentum entangled biphoton state propagating through a turbulent atmosphere. The derivation is based on the distortion that orbital angular momentum states experience due to propagation through a thin sheet of turbulent atmosphere. This distortion is treated as an infinitesimal transformation leading to a first-order differential equation, which we call an infinitesimal propagation equation. The equation is applied to a simple qubit case to show how the entanglement decays.