No Arabic abstract
We study the effect of the exciton fine-structure splitting on the polarisation-entanglement of photon pairs produced by the biexciton cascade in a single quantum dot. The entanglement is found to persist despite separations between the intermediate energy levels of up to 4 micro-eV. Measurements demonstrate that entanglement of the photon pair is robust to the dephasing of the intermediate exciton state responsible for the first order coherence time of either single photon. We present a theoretical framework taking into account the effects of spin-scattering, background light and dephasing. We distinguish between the first-order coherence time, and a parameter which we measure for the first time and define as the cross-coherence time.
In this paper, we propose two protocols for generating super-resolving textit{single-photon} path-entangled states from general maximally path-entangled N00N states. We also show that both protocols generate the desired state with different probabilities depending on the type of detectors being used. Such super-resolving single-photon path-entangled states preserve high resolving power but lack the requirement of a multi-photon absorbing resist, which makes this state a perfect candidate for quantum lithography.
Path-entangled N-photon states can be obtained through the coalescence of indistinguishable photons inside linear networks. They are key resources for quantum enhanced metrology, quantum imaging, as well as quantum computation based on quantum walks. However, the quantum tomography of path-entangled indistinguishable photons is still in its infancy as it requires multiple phase estimations increasing rapidly with N. Here, we propose and implement a method to measure the quantum tomography of path-entangled two-photon states. A two-photon state is generated through the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of highly indistinguishable single photons emitted by a semiconductor quantum dot-cavity device. To access both the populations and the coherences of the path-encoded density matrix, we introduce an ancilla spatial mode and perform photon correlations as a function of a single phase in a split Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We discuss the accuracy of standard quantum tomography techniques and show that an overcomplete data set can reveal spatial coherences that could be otherwise hidden due to limited or noisy statistics. Finally, we extend our analysis to extract the truly indistinguishable part of the density matrix, which allows us to identify the main origin for the imperfect fidelity to the maximally entangled state.
Recently Xiao et al. proposed a scheme for entanglement purification based on doubly entangled photon states (Phys. Rev. A 77(2008) 042315). We modify their scheme for improving the efficiency of entanglement purification. This modified scheme contains two steps, i.e., the bit-flip error correction and the entanglement purification of phase-flip errors. All the photon pairs in the first step can be kept as all the bit-flip errors are corrected. For purifying the phase-flip errors, a wavelength conversion process is needed. This scheme has the advantage of high efficiency and it requires the original fidelity of the entangled state wanted fay lower than other schemes, which makes it more feasible in a practical application.
Hybrid entangled states, having entanglement between different degrees-of-freedom (DoF) of a particle pair, are of great interest for quantum information science and communication protocols. Among different DoFs, the hybrid entangled states encoded with polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) allow the generation of qubit-qudit entangled states, macroscopic entanglement with very high quanta of OAM and improvement in angular resolution in remote sensing. Till date, such hybrid entangled states are generated by using a high-fidelity polarization entangled state and subsequent imprinting of chosen amount of OAM using suitable mode converters such as spatial light modulator in complicated experimental schemes. Given that the entangled sources have feeble number of photons, loss of photons during imprinting of OAM using diffractive optical elements limits the use of such hybrid state for practical applications. Here we report, on a simple experimental scheme to generate hybrid entangled state in polarization and OAM through direct transfer of classical non-separable state of the pump beam in parametric down conversion process. As a proof of principle, using local non-separable pump state of OAM mode l=3, we have produced quantum hybrid entangled state with entanglement witness parameter of W-1.25 violating by 8 standard deviation. The generic scheme can be used to produce hybrid entangled state between two photons differing by any quantum number through proper choice of non-separable state of the pump beam.
We perform full time resolved tomographic measurements of the polarization state of pairs of photons emitted during the radiative cascade of the confined biexciton in a semiconductor quantum dot. The biexciton was deterministically initiated using a $pi$-area pulse into the biexciton two-photon absorption resonance. Our measurements demonstrate that the polarization states of the emitted photon pair are maximally entangled. We show that the measured degree of entanglement depends solely on the temporal resolution by which the time difference between the emissions of the photon pair is determined. A route for fabricating an on demand source of maximally polarization entangled photon pairs is thereby provided.