Quantum entanglement of complex photon polarization patterns in vector beams

Autor(en)

Robert Fickler, Radek Lapkiewicz, Sven Ramelow, Anton Zeilinger

Abstrakt

We report the efficient creation and detection of hybrid entanglement between one photon's polarization and another photon's complex transverse polarization pattern including various polarization singularities. The polarization measurement of the first photon triggers a polarization-sensitive imaging of its partner photon, the vector photon, using a single-photon-sensitive camera. Thereby, the vector photon's complex polarization pattern is reconstructed tomographically dependent on the type of polarization measurement performed on its partner. To evaluate the quality of the observed patterns, we introduce a fidelity-like measure which compares the reconstructed polarization with the theoretically expected one at every transverse spatial position. We find that the measured polarization patterns and the theory overlap by more than 90%. Moreover, we visualize the varying strengths of polarization entanglement for different transverse regions and demonstrate an interesting phenomenon: Each vector photon can be both entangled and not entangled in polarization with its partner photon. We give an intuitive, information-theoretical explanation for our results. Our results pave the way to study quantum properties of the rich field of such complex light modes with the potential to improve various applications in quantum informational tasks.

Organisation(en)

Quantenoptik, Quantennanophysik und Quanteninformation

Externe Organisation(en)

Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW)

Journal

Physical Review A

Band

89

Anzahl der Seiten

5

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.89.060301

Publikationsdatum

06-2014

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

103025 Quantenmechanik, 103026 Quantenoptik

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/398ba7ed-6eef-424c-af24-239a8e533dbb