Abstract
Macroscopic quantum phenomena, e.g., superconductivity and squeezing, are believed to result from entanglement of macroscopic numbers of particles. We report the first direct study of this kind of entanglement: we use discrete quantum tomography to reconstruct the joint quantum state of photon pairs extracted from polarization-squeezed light. Our observations confirm several predictions from spin-squeezing theory [Beduini et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 143601 (2013)], including strong entanglement and entanglement of all photon pairs within the squeezing coherence time. This photon-by-photon analysis may give insight into other macroscopic many-body systems, e.g., photon Bose-Einstein condensates.
- Received 15 January 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.120402
© 2015 American Physical Society