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arXiv:quant-ph/0608163 · Physical Review A

Transverse entanglement migration in Hilbert space

Kam Wai Clifford Chan, Juan P. Torres, Joseph H. Eberly

Published May 9, 2007• 114 citations
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Abstract

We show that, although the amount of mutual entanglement of photons propagating in free space is fixed, the type of correlations between the photons that determine the entanglement can dramatically change during propagation. We show that this amounts to a migration of entanglement in Hilbert space, rather than real space. For the case of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, the migration of entanglement in transverse coordinates takes place from modulus to phase of the biphoton state and back again. We propose an experiment to observe this migration in Hilbert space and to determine the full entanglement.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.75.050101

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We show that, although the amount of mutual entanglement of photons propagating in free space is fixed, the type of correlations between the photons that determine the entanglement can dramatically change during propagation. We show that this amounts to a migration of entanglement in Hilbert space, rather than real space. For the case of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, the migration of entanglement in transverse coordinates takes place from modulus to phase of the biphoton state and back again. We propose an experiment to observe this migration in Hilbert space and to determine the full entanglement.
High-dimensional entanglement in the form of transverse spatial correlation between a pair of photons generated via spontaneous parametric downconversion is not only a valuable resource in many academic and real-life applications but also provides access to several intriguing quantum phenomena. One such non-intuitive phenomenon is phase entanglement, in which the biphoton state is correlated in the complex phase of its wavefunction. This state, which emerges during the propagation of the biphoton wavefunction, exhibits neither position nor momentum correlation, yet retains full entanglement. In this work, we experimentally explore this state in two distinct ways. The first is by tracking the vanishing spatial photon number correlation over propagation distances lying in [0,∞)\left[0,\infty\right)[0,∞), folded into a finite range using single-lens imaging. These observations show excellent agreement with our theoretical predictions based on the Double Gaussian (DG) approximation of the biphoton state. The second approach involves performing a two-photon interference experiment using a double slit and this state, which reveals the correlated phase front. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that the observed two-photon interference structure is markedly different from that produced by position-correlated photons, as confirmed by computing the joint probability distribution of photons (JPD) and related metrics. Such interference using phase-entangled light has not been attempted before and opens avenues for advanced experiments and applications in the field of spatial entanglement.
We measure the transverse entanglement of photon pairs on their propagation from the near to the far field of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). The Fedorov ratio, depending on the widths of conditional and unconditional intensity measurements, is shown to be only able to characterize entanglement in the near and far field zones of the source. Therefore we also follow a different approach. By evaluating the first-order coherence of a subsystem of the state we can quantify its entanglement. Unlike previous measurements, which determine the Fedorov ratio via intensity correlations, our setup is sensitive to both phase and modulus of the biphoton state and thus always grants experimental access to the full transverse entanglement of the SPDC state. It is shown theoretically that this scheme represents a direct measurement of the Schmidt number.