In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that the photon pairs generated via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a hot atomic ensemble are in entangled orbital angular momentum (OAM) states. The density matrix of the OAM states of the photon pair is reconstructed, from which the fidelity to the maximal entangled state and the concurrence are estimated to be about 0.89 and 0.81, respectively. The experimental result also suggests the existence of the entanglement concerned with spatial degrees of freedom between the hot atomic ensemble and the Stokes photon.
We experimentally demonstrate a scheme for the preparation of high-dimensional hyperentangled photon pairs with path degree of freedom (DOF) and orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) DOF using beam displacer (BD) interferometers from a warm atomic ensemble. A strong Gaussian pump beam of fixed frequency passes through the BD to produce a superposition state of two paths. The biphoton state is generated from two parallel spontaneous four-wave mixing processes in the
85Rb vapor cell. We successfully detect the path entanglement, two-dimensional OAM entanglement, and three-dimensional OAM entanglement by selecting the appropriate measurement. Due to the advantages of the simplicity of our interaction system and high dimensionality of the narrowband hyperentangled photons we generated, such hyperentangled source from an atomic ensemble can be utilized to realize high-dimensional multiple-DOF quantum memory and quantum communication in the future.