We present the experimental quantum tomography of 7- and 8-dimensional quantum systems based on projective measurements in the mutually unbiased basis (MUB-QT). One of the advantages of MUB-QT is that it requires projections from a minimal number of bases to be performed. In our scheme, the higher dimensional quantum systems are encoded using the propagation modes of single photons, and we take advantage of the capabilities of amplitude- and phase-modulation of programmable spatial light modulators to implement the MUB-QT.
Individual members of an ensemble of identical systems coupled to a common probe can become entangled with one another, even when they do not interact directly. We investigate how this type of multipartite entanglement is generated in the context of a system consisting of two two-level atoms resonantly coupled to a single mode of the electromagnetic field. The dynamical evolution is studied in terms of the entanglements in the different bipartite partitions of the system, as quantified by the I tangle. We also propose a generalization of the so-called residual tangle that quantifies the inherent three-body correlations in our tripartite system. This enables us to completely characterize the phenomenon of entanglement sharing in the case of the two-atom Tavis-Cummings model, a system of both theoretical and experimental interest.
A long-standing problem in quantum mechanics is the minimum number of observables required for the characterization of unknown pure quantum states. The solution to this problem is especially important for the developing field of high-dimensional quantum information processing. In this work we demonstrate that any pure -dimensional state is unambiguously reconstructed by measuring five observables, that is, via projective measurements onto the states of five orthonormal bases. Thus, in our method the total number of different measurement outcomes () scales linearly with . The state reconstruction is robust against experimental errors and requires simple postprocessing, regardless of . We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme through the reconstruction of eight-dimensional quantum states, encoded in the momentum of single photons.
Quantum teleportation of qudits is revisited. In particular, we analyze the case where the quantum channel corresponds to a nonmaximally entangled state and show that the success of the protocol is directly related to the problem of distinguishing nonorthogonal quantum states. The teleportation channel can be seen as a coherent superposition of two channels, one of them being a maximally entangled state, thus leading to perfect teleportation, and the other, corresponding to a nonmaximally entangled state living in a subspace of the d-dimensional Hilbert space. The second channel leads to a teleported state with reduced fidelity. We calculate the average fidelity of the process and show its optimality.
15 October 2001 in Journal of Physics A: General Physics
Quantum measurements on a two-level system can have more than two independent outcomes, and in this case, the measurement cannot be projective. Measurements of this general type are essential to an operational approach to quantum theory, but so far, the nonprojective character of a measurement can only be verified experimentally by already assuming a specific quantum model of parts of the experimental setup. Here, we overcome this restriction by using a device-independent approach. In an experiment on pairs of polarization-entangled photonic qubits we violate by more than 8 standard deviations a Bell-like correlation inequality that is valid for all sets of two-outcome measurements in any dimension. We combine this with a device-independent verification that the system is best described by two qubits, which therefore constitutes the first device-independent certification of a nonprojective quantum measurement.