No Arabic abstract
The key requirement for quantum networking is the distribution of entanglement between nodes. Surprisingly, entanglement can be generated across a network without direct transfer - or communication - of entanglement. In contrast to information gain, which cannot exceed the communicated information, the entanglement gain is bounded by the communicated quantum discord, a more general measure of quantum correlation that includes but is not limited to entanglement. Here, we experimentally entangle two communicating parties sharing three initially separable photonic qubits by exchange of a carrier photon that is unentangled with either party at all times. We show that distributing entanglement with separable carriers is resilient to noise and in some cases becomes the only way of distributing entanglement through noisy environments.
Three distant labs A, B and C, having no prior entanglement can establish a shared GHZ state, when one of them say A sends two particles to B and C for their local actions. The mediating particles remain separable from each other and from the particles of A, B and C. We prove that in this way, GHZ states are shared with a probability $frac{1}{7}$. We also show how separable particles can be mediated to establish arbitrary $d-$ dimensional Bell states between distant labs. Our method is constructive and allows generaization of GHZ sharing between any number of parties and in any dimension. The proposed method may facilitate the construction of multi-node quantum networks and many other processes which use multi-partite entangled states.
The development and wide application of quantum technologies highly depend on the capacity of the communication channels distributing entanglement. Space-division multiplexing (SDM) enhanced channel capacities in classical telecommunication and bears the potential to transfer the idea to quantum communication using current infrastructure. Here, we demonstrate an SDM of polarization-entangled photons over a 411m long 19-core multicore fiber distributing polarization-entangled photon pairs through up to 12 channels simultaneously. The quality of the multiplexed transfer is evidenced by high polarization visibility and CHSH Bell inequality violation for each pair of opposite cores. Our distribution scheme shows high stability over 24 hours without any active polarization stabilization and can be effortlessly adapted to a higher number of channels. This technique increases the quantum-channel capacity and allows the reliable implementation of quantum networks of multiple users based on a single entangled-photon pair source.
The paper reports on experimental diagnostics of entanglement swapping protocol by means of collective entanglement witness. Our approach is suitable to detect disturbances occurring in the preparation of quantum states, quantum communication channel and imperfect Bell-state projection. More specifically we demonstrate that our method can distinguish disturbances such as depolarization, phase-damping, amplitude-damping and imperfect Bell-state measurement by observing four probabilities and estimating collective entanglement witness. Since entanglement swapping is a key procedure for quantum repeaters, quantum relays, device-independent quantum communications or entanglement assisted error correction, this can aid in faster and practical resolution of quality-of-transmission related problems as our approach requires less measurements then other means of diagnostics.
An analogous model system for high-dimensional quantum entanglement is proposed, based on the angular and radial degrees of freedom of the improved Laguerre Gaussian mode. Experimentally, we observed strong violations of the Bell-CGLMP inequality for maximally non-separable states of dimension 2 through 10. The results for violations in classical non-separable state are in very good agreement with quantum instance, which illustrates that our scheme can be a useful platform to simulate high-dimensional non-local entanglement. Additionally, we found that the Bell measurements provide sufficient criteria for identifying mode separability in a high-dimensional space. Similar to the two-dimensional spin-orbit non-separable state, the proposed high-dimensional angular-radial non-separable state may provide promising applications for classical and quantum information processing.
Noise can be considered the natural enemy of quantum information. An often implied benefit of high-dimensional entanglement is its increased resilience to noise. However, manifesting this potential in an experimentally meaningful fashion is challenging and has never been done before. In infinite dimensional spaces, discretisation is inevitable and renders the effective dimension of quantum states a tunable parameter. Owing to advances in experimental techniques and theoretical tools, we demonstrate an increased resistance to noise by identifying two pathways to exploit high-dimensional entangled states. Our study is based on two separate experiments utilising canonical spatio-temporal properties of entangled photon pairs. Following these different pathways to noise resilience, we are able to certify entanglement in the photonic orbital-angular-momentum and energy-time degrees of freedom up to noise conditions corresponding to a noise fraction of 72 % and 92 % respectively. Our work paves the way towards practical quantum communication systems that are able to surpass current noise and distance limitations, while not compromising on potential device-independence.