Entanglement of Orbital Angular Momentum States of Photons

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Abstract

So far experimental confirmation of entanglement has been restricted to qubits, i.e. two-state quantum systems including recent realization of three- and four-qubit entanglements. Yet, an ever increasing body of theoretical work calls for entanglement in quantum system of higher dimensions. Here we report the first realization of multi-dimensional entanglement exploiting the orbital angular momentum of photons, which are states of the electromagnetic field with phase singularities (doughnut modes). The properties of such states could be of importance for the efforts in the field of quantum computation and quantum communication. For example, quantum cryptography with higher alphabets could enable one to increase the information flux through the communication channels.

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Die gegenw�rtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik

E. Schr�dinger (1935)

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Experimental entanglement of four particles

Sackett, Kielpinski, King … (2000)

Quantum mechanics allows for many-particle wavefunctions that cannot be factorized into a product of single-particle wavefunctions, even when the constituent particles are entirely distinct. Such 'entangled' states explicitly demonstrate the non-local character of quantum theory, having potential applications in high-precision spectroscopy, quantum communication, cryptography and computation. In general, the more particles that can be entangled, the more clearly nonclassical effects are exhibited--and the more useful the states are for quantum applications. Here we implement a recently proposed entanglement technique to generate entangled states of two and four trapped ions. Coupling between the ions is provided through their collective motional degrees of freedom, but actual motional excitation is minimized. Entanglement is achieved using a single laser pulse, and the method can in principle be applied to any number of ions.