In this paper, photonic entanglement and interference are described and analyzed with the language of quantum information process. Correspondingly, a photon state involving several degrees of freedom is represented in a new expression based on the pe
rmutation symmetry of bosons. In this expression, each degree of freedom of a single photon is regarded as a qubit and operations on photons as qubit gates. The two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel interference is well interpreted with it. Moreover, the analysis reveals the entanglement between different degrees of freedom in a four-photon state from parametric down conversion, even if there is no entanglement between them in the two-photon state. The entanglement will decrease the state purity and photon interference visibility in the experiments on a four-photon polarization state.
We construct a linear optics measurement process to determine the entanglement measure, named emph{I-concurrence}, of a set of $4 times 4$ dimensional two-photon entangled pure states produced in the optical parametric down conversion process. In our
experiment, an emph{equivalent} symmetric projection for the two-fold copy of single subsystem (presented by L. Aolita and F. Mintert, Phys. Rev. Lett. textbf{97}, 050501 (2006)) can be realized by observing the one-side two-photon coincidence without any triggering detection on the other subsystem. Here, for the first time, we realize the measurement for entanglement contained in bi-photon pure states by taking advantage of the indistinguishability and the bunching effect of photons. Our method can determine the emph{I-concurrence} of generic high dimensional bipartite pure states produced in parametric down conversion process.
We propose and demonstrate experimentally a projection scheme to measure the quantum phase with a precision beating the standard quantum limit. The initial input state is a twin Fock state $|N,N>$ proposed by Holland and Burnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf
71}, 1355 (1993)] but the phase information is extracted by a quantum state projection measurement. The phase precision is about $1.4/N$ for large photon number $N$, which approaches the Heisenberg limit of 1/N. Experimentally, we employ a four-photon state from type-II parametric down-conversion and achieve a phase uncertainty of $0.291pm 0.001$ beating the standard quantum limit of $1/sqrt{N} = 1/2$ for four photons.
