The novel experimental realization of four-level optical quantum systems (ququarts) is presented. We exploit the polarization properties of frequency non-degenerate biphoton field to obtain such systems. A simple method that does not rely on interferometer is used to generate and measure the sequence of states that can be used in quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol.
We propose and examine the use of biphoton pairs, such as those created in parametric down conversion or four-wave mixing, to enhance the precision and the resolution of measuring optical displacements by position-sensitive detection. We show that the precision of measuring a small optical beam displacement with this method can be significantly enhanced by the correlation between the two photons, given the same optical mode. The improvement is largest if the correlations between the photons are strong, and falls off as the biphoton correlation weakens. More surprisingly, we find that the smallest resolvable parameter of a simple split detector scales as the inverse of the number of biphotons for small biphoton number (Heisenberg scaling), because the Fisher information diverges as the parameter to be estimated decreases in value. One usually sees this scaling only for systems with many entangled degrees of freedom. We discuss the transition for the split-detection scheme to the standard quantum limit scaling for imperfect correlations as the biphoton number is increased. An analysis of an $N$-pixel detector is also given to investigate the benefit of using a higher resolution detector. The physical limit of these metrology schemes is determined by the uncertainty in the birth zone of the biphoton in the nonlinear crystal.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is an essential tool for characterizing an unknown quantum state. Recently, QST has been performed for entangled qudits based on orbital angular momentum, time-energy uncertainty, and frequency bins. Here, we propose a QST for time-bin qudits, with which the number of measurement settings scales linearly with dimension $d$. Using the proposed scheme, we performed QST for a four-dimensional time-bin maximally entangled state with 16 measurement settings. We successfully reconstructed the density matrix of the entangled qudits, with which the average fidelity of the state was calculated to be 0.950.
We propose and demonstrate the scaling up of photonic graph state through path qubit fusion. Two path qubits from separate two-photon four-qubit states are fused to generate a two-dimensional seven-qubit graph state composed of polarization and path qubits. Genuine seven-qubit entanglement is verified by evaluating the witness operator. Six qubits from the graph state are used to execute the general two-qubit Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm with a success probability greater than 90%.
Quantum sorter has gained a lot of attention during the last years due to its wide application in quantum information processing and quantum technologies. A challenging task is the construction of a quantum sorter, which collect many high-dimensional quantum systems, which are simultaneously incident on different input ports of the device. In this paper we give the definition of the general quantum sorter of multi-level quantum systems. We prove the impossibility of the construction of the perfect quantum sorter, which works for many particles incident on any input port, while keeping their states unmodified. Further we propose an approximate multi-particle multi-input-port quantum sorter, which performs the selection of the particles in a certain output port according to the properties of the initial states, but changing the final states. This method is useful for those situations which require high speed of quantum state sorting. Thus, the information contained in the initial states of the particles is revealed by the click statistics of the detectors situated in each output port.
Focus is on two parties with Hilbert spaces of dimension d, i.e. qudits. In the state space of these two possibly entangled qudits an analogue to the well known tetrahedron with the four qubit Bell states at the vertices is presented. The simplex analogue to this magic tetrahedron includes mixed states. Each of these states appears to each of the two parties as the maximally mixed state. Some studies on these states are performed, and special elements of this set are identified. A large number of them is included in the chosen simplex which fits exactly into conditions needed for teleportation and other applications. Its rich symmetry - related to that of a classical phase space - helps to study entanglement, to construct witnesses and perform partial transpositions. This simplex has been explored in details for d=3. In this paper the mathematical background and extensions to arbitrary dimensions are analysed.