Abstract
Although frequency multiplexing of information has revolutionized the field of classical communications, the color degree of freedom (DOF) has been used relatively little for quantum applications. We experimentally demonstrate a new hybrid quantum gate that transfers polarization entanglement of nondegenerate photons onto the color DOF. We create, for the first time, high-quality, discretely color-entangled states (with energy band gap up to 8.4 THz) without any spectrally selective filtering, and unambiguously verify and quantify the amount of entanglement (tangle, ) by reconstructing a restricted density matrix; we generate a range of maximally entangled states, including a set of mutually unbiased bases for an encoded qubit space. The technique can be generalized to transfer polarization entanglement onto other photonic DOFs, like orbital angular momentum.
- Received 30 April 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.253601
©2009 American Physical Society