The recent surface plasmon entanglement experiment [E. Altewischer et al., Nature (London) 418, 304 (2002)] is theoretically analyzed. The entanglement preservation upon transmission in the non-focused case is found to provide information about the interaction of the biphoton and the metallic film. The entanglement degradation in the focused case is explained in the framework of a fully multimode model. This phenomenon is a consequence of the polarization-selective filtering behavior of the metallic nanostructured film.
We present an experimental evidence that high dimensional orbital angular momentum entanglement of a pair of photons can be survived after a photon-plasmon-photon conversion. The information of spatial modes can be coherently transmitted by surface plasmons. This experiment primarily studies the high dimensional entangled systems based on surface plasmon with subwavelength structures. It maybe useful in the investigation of spatial mode properties of surface plasmon assisted transmission through subwavelength hole arrays.
Orbital angular momentum of photons is explored to study the spatial mode properties of plasmon assisted transmission process. We found that photons carrying different orbital angular momentums have different transmission efficiencies, while the coherence between these spatial modes can be preserved.
We experimentally study two-photon coherence in plasmon-assisted transmission with a two-photon Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer. Two collinear photons of identical or orthogonal polarization are simultaneously incident on one optically thick metal film, perforated with a periodic array of subwavelength holes. The de Broglie wavelength of plasmon-assisted transmitted photons is measured, which shows that two photons are re-eradiated by the plasmons and the quantum coherence of biphoton is preserved in the conversion process of transforming biphoton to plasmons and then back to biphoton.
We report on experimental evidences of the preservation of energy-time entanglement for extraordinary plasmonic light transmission through sub-wavelength metallic hole arrays, and for long range surface plasmon polaritons. Plasmons are shown to coherently exist at two different times separated by much more than the plasmons lifetime. This kind of entanglement involving light and matter is expected to be useful for future processing and storing of quantum information.
We show how to generate and control the correlations in a set of two distant quantum emitters coupled to a one-dimensional dissipative plasmonic waveguide. An external laser field enhances the dimer's steady-state correlations and allows an active control (switching on/off) of nonclassical correlations. The plasmon-assisted dipolar-interacting qubits exhibit persistent correlations, which in turn can be decoupled and made to evolve independently from each other. The setup enables long-distance ($\sim 1\, μ$m) qubit control that works for both resonant and detuned emitters. For suitable emitter…
In this article, non-classical properties of Raman modes are investigated. The original goal, actually, is to identify how and by which method we can induce non-classicality in Raman modes. We introduce a plasmonic system in which Raman dye molecules are buried between two shells of the plasmonic materials similar to onion-like core/shell nanoparticle. This system is excited by the entangled photons, followed by analyzing its dynamics of motion using the Heisenberg-Langevin equations by which the time evolution of the signal-idler mode and Raman modes are derived. Interestingly, the entangled …
The state of a two-particle system is called entangled when its quantum mechanical wave function cannot be factorized in two single-particle wave functions. Entanglement leads to the strongest counter-intuitive feature of quantum mechanics, namely nonlocality. Experimental realization of quantum entanglement is relatively easy for the case of photons; a pump photon can spontaneously split into a pair of entangled photons inside a nonlinear crystal. In this paper we combine quantum entanglement with nanostructured metal optics in the form of optically thick metal films perforated with a periodi…
We show that all pure entangled states of two $d$-dimensional quantum systems (i.e., two qudits) can be generated from an initial separable state via a universal Yang--Baxter matrix if one is assisted by local unitary transformations.
We suggest a novel source of polarization-entangled photon pairs based on a cross-shaped plasmonic nanoantenna driven by a single quantum dot. The integration of the nanoantenna with a metal mirror overcomes the fundamental tradeoff between the spontaneous emission (SE) enhancement and the extraction efficiency typical of microcavity and nanowire-based architectures. With a very-high extraction efficiency of entangled photons (~90%) at 1.55 um and large SE enhancement (~90) over a broad 330 nm spectral range, the proposed design will pave the way toward reliable integrated sources of nonclassi…
We show that bipartite and tripartite entangled states cannot be used as catalysis states to enable local transformations inbetween inequivalent classes of three-particle entangled states which are non-interchangeable under local transformations. We find the optimal protocol for conversion of a certain family of the W-states and an EPR-pair into the GHZ-state.
The present paper theoretically investigates features of quantum dynamics for localized plasmons in three-particle or four-particle spaser systems consisting of metal nanoparticles and semiconductor quantum dots. In the framework of the mean field approximation, the conditions for the observation of stable stationary regimes for single-particle plasmons in spaser systems are revealed, and realization of these regimes is discussed. The strong dipole-dipole interaction between adjacent nanoparticles for the four-particle spaser system is investigated. We show that this interaction can lead to th…
We demonstrate the capability to discretize the frequency spectrum of broadband energy-time entangled photons by means of a spatial light modulator to encode qudits in various bases. Exemplarily, we implement three different discretization schemes, namely frequency bins, time bins and Schmidt modes. Entangled qudits up to dimension $d=4$ are then revealed by two-photon interference experiments with visibilities violating a $d$-dimensional Bell inequality.
Spontaneous down conversion in metal-dielectric interface in case of oblique laser excitation is considered. In this case it is possible to generate pairs of polarization entangled surface plasmon polaritons with high efficiency if to use excitation angle corresponding to the Kretschmann configuration for generated plasmons. The efficiency can be additionally enlarged if to use properly nanostructured metallic film allowing one to directly excite surface plasmon polaritons and to fulfill phase matching condition of them with generated surface plasmon polaritons.
Emission of photon pairs by metal-dielectric interface in case of a superluminally propagating laser-induced nonlinear polarization is considered. Using oblique incidence of the laser wave it is possible to tune frequencies of generated photons due to the Doppler effect. For every frequency smaller than frequency of induced polarization there exist an excitation angle when singular enhancement of the emission takes place. Emitted photon pairs are in the polarization entangled state. The yield of emission is estimated.
We investigate the two-plasmon spontaneous decay of a quantum emitter near single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) and graphene-coated wires (GCWs). We demonstrate efficient, enhanced generation of two-plasmon entangled states in SWCNTs due to the strong coupling between tunable guided plasmons and the quantum emitter. We predict two-plasmon emission rates more than twelve orders of magnitude higher than in free-space, with average lifetimes of a few dozens of nanoseconds. Given their low dimensionality, these systems could be more efficient for generating and detecting entangled plasmons in co…
Dissipative entanglement generation protocols embrace environmental interactions in order to generate long-lived entangled states. In this letter, we report on the anti-bunching dynamics for a pair of actively driven quantum emitters coupled to a shared dissipative plasmonic reservoir. We find that anti-bunching is a universal signature for entangled states generated by dissipative means and examine its use as an entanglement diagnostic. We discuss the experimental validation of plasmonically mediated entanglement generation by Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry with picosecond timing resoluti…
We present a scheme to generate the frequency multiplexed entangled (FME) single photons based on the entanglement between two species atomic mixture ensemble. The write and reads fields driven according to a certain timing sequence, the generation of FME single photons can be repeated until success is achieved. The source might have significant applications in wavelength division multiplexing quantum key distribution.
We propose a feasible scheme to create $n$-party ($n\geq 2$) polarization-entangled photon states in a controllable way. The scheme requires only single-photon sources, single-photon quantum non-demolition measurement (SP-QNDM) and simple linear optical elements, usually with high perfections. The SP-QNDM acts as a non-destructive projection measurement onto the wanted entangled states and filters out the unwanted terms. Our scheme in fact realizes entanglement of non-interacting photons; the interaction occurs only implicitly in the optical elements and SP-QNDM. We also briefly consider purif…
We discuss the generation of entangled states of two two-level atoms inside an optical cavity. The cavity mode is supposed to be coupled to a white noise with adjustable intensity. We describe how the entanglement between the atoms inside the cavity arise in such a situation. The entanglement is maximized for intermediate values of the noise intensity, while it is a monotonic function of the spontaneous rate. This resembles the phenomenon of stochastic resonance and sheds more light on the idea to exploit white noise in quantum information processing.
It is well known that one can extract all the information of an unknown quantum channel by means of quantum process tomography, such as standard quantum-process tomography and ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography (AAQPT). Furthermore, it has been shown that entanglement is not necessary for AAQPT, there exist separable states which are also useful for it. Surprisingly, in this work we find that not all entangled states are useful for AAQPT, there also exist some entangled states which are useless. The realignment operation used in entanglement detection can be related to the question wh…
We show that a strong infrared laser beam obliquely incident on graphene can experience a parametric instability with respect to decay into lower-frequency (idler) photons and THz surface plasmons. The instability is due to a strong in-plane second-order nonlinear response of graphene which originates from its spatial dispersion. The parametric decay leads to efficient generation of THz plasmons and gives rise to quantum entanglement of idler photons and surface plasmon states. A similar process can be supported by surface states of topological insulators such as Bi$_2$Se$_3$.
The main obstacle for coherent control of open quantum systems is decoherence due to different dissipation channels and the inability to precisely control experimental parameters. To overcome these problems we propose to use dissipation-assisted adiabatic passages. These are relatively fast processes where the presence of spontaneous decay rates corrects for errors due to non-adiabaticity while the system remains in a decoherence-free state and behaves as predicted for an adiabatic passage. As a concrete example we present a scheme to entangle atoms by moving them in and out of an optical cavi…
We put forward two efficient entanglement concentration protocols (ECPs) for distilling the maximally entangled NOON state from arbitrary less-entangled NOON state with only an auxiliary single photon. With the help of the weak cross-Kerr nonlinearities, both the two ECPs can be used repeatedly to get a high success probability. In the first ECP, the auxiliary single photon should be shared by the two parties say Alice and Bob. In the second ECP, the auxiliary single photon is only possessed by Bob, which can greatly increase the practical success probability by avoiding the transmission loss.…
Quantum networks provide a prominent platform for realizing quantum information processing and quantum communication, with entanglement being a key resource in such applications. Here, we describe the dissipative transport protocol for entangled states, where entanglement stored in the first node of quantum network can be transported with high fidelity to the second node via a 1D chiral waveguide. In particular, we exploit the directional asymmetry in chirally-coupled single-mode ring resonators to transport entangled states. For the fully chiral waveguide, Bell states, multipartite $W$-states…
We analyze nonlinear optics schemes for generating pairs of quantum entangled plasmons in the terahertz-infrared range in graphene. We predict that high plasmonic field concentration and strong optical nonlinearity of monolayer graphene enables pair-generation rates much higher than those of conventional photonic sources. The first scheme we study is spontaneous parametric down conversion in a graphene nanoribbon. In this second-order nonlinear process a plasmon excited by an external pump splits into a pair of plasmons, of half the original frequency each, emitted in opposite directions. The …
We analyse the quantum mechanical limits to the plasmon-assisted entanglement transfer observed by E. Altewischer, M.P. van Exter, and J.P. Woerdman [Nature, 418, 304 (2002)]. The maximal violation S of Bell's inequality at the photodetectors behind two linear media (such as the perforated metal films in the experiment) can be described by two ratio's tau_1, tau_2 of polarization-dependent transmission probabilities. A fully entangled incident state is transferred without degradation for tau_1=tau_2, but a relatively large mismatch of tau_1 and tau_2 can be tolerated with a small reduction of …
We analyze entanglement swapping (ES) of partially entangled pure states with arbitrary Schmidt rank from the perspective of quantum state discrimination. It is shown that the standard deterministic ES protocol is related with an optimal minimum-error strategy. In this case the amount of entanglement of the states resulting from swapping is, in general, lower than the maximum achievable for the quantum channels involved. In this regard, we show that the ES protocol can be probabilistically improved resorting to optimal maximum-confidence (MC) discrimination strategy. Additionally, we show that…
We present two realistic entanglement concentration protocols (ECPs) for pure partially entangled photons. A partially entangled photon pair can be concentrated to a maximally entangled pair with only an ancillary single photon in a certain probability, while the conventional ones require two copies of partially entangled pairs at least. Our first protocol is implemented with linear optics and the second one is implemented with cross-Kerr nonlinearities. Compared with other ECPs, they do not need to know the accurate coefficients of the initial state. With linear optics, it is feasible with cu…
We consider generic pure $n$-qubit states and a general class of pure states of arbitrary dimensions and arbitrarily many subsystems. We characterize those states which can be reached from some other state via Local Operations assisted by finitely many rounds of Classical Communication ($LOCC_{\mathbb{N}}$). For $n$ qubits with $n>3$ we show that this set of states is of measure zero, which implies that the maximally entangled set is generically of full measure if restricted to the practical scenario of $LOCC_{\mathbb{N}}$. Moreover, we identify a class of states for which any $LOCC_{\mathbb{N…
We theoretically demonstrate coherent control over propagation of surface plasmon polaritons(SPP), at both telecommunication and visible wavelengths, on a metallic surface adjacent to quantum coherence (phaseonium) medium composed of three-level quantum emitters (semiconductor quantum dots, atoms, rare-earth ions, etc.) embedded in a dielectric host. The coherent drive allows us to provide sufficient gain for lossless SPP propagation and also lowers the pumping requirements. In case of lossy propagation, an order of magnitude enhancement in propagation length can be achieved. Optical control o…
We present an efficient entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for mobile electrons with charge detection. This protocol is quite different from other ECPs for one can obtain a maximally entangled pair from a pair of less-entangled state and a single mobile electron with a certain probability. With the help of charge detection, it can be repeated to reach a higher success probability. It also does not need to know the coefficient of the original less-entangled states. All these advantages may make this protocol useful in current distributed quantum information processing.
Coherence and entanglement are fundamental concepts in resource theory. The coherence (entanglement) of assistance is the coherence (entanglement) that can be extracted assisted by another party with local measurement and classical communication. We introduce and study the general coherence of assistance. First, in terms of real symmetric concave functions on the probability simplex, the coherence of assistance and the entanglement of assistance are shown to be in one-to-one correspondence. We then introduce two classes of quantum states: the assisted maximally coherent states and the assisted…
We report on the efficient generation, propagation, and re-emission of squeezed long-range surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a gold waveguide. Squeezed light is used to excite the non-classical SPPs and the re-emitted quantum state is fully quantum characterized by complete tomographic reconstruction of the density matrix. We find that the plasmon-assisted transmission of non-classical light in metallic waveguides can be described by a Hamiltonian analogue to a beam splitter. This result is explained theoretically.
Quantum nonlocality, i.e. the presence of strong correlations in spatially seperated systems which are forbidden by local realism, lies at the heart of quantum communications and quantum computing. Here, we use polarization-entangled photon pairs to demonstrate a nonlocal control of absorption of light in a plasmonic structure. Through the detection of one photon with a polarization-sensitive device, we can almost deterministically prevent or allow absorption of a second, remotely located photon. We demonstrate this with pairs of photons, one of which is absorbed by coupling into a plasmon of …
Tho-photon Rabi oscillations hold potential for quantum computing and quantum information processing, because during a Rabi cycle a pair of entangled photons may be created. We theoretically investigate the onset of this phenomenon in a heterodimer comprising a semiconductor quantum dot strongly coupled to a metal nanoparticle. Two-photon Rabi oscillations in this system occur due to a coherent two-photon process involving the ground-to-biexciton transition in the quantum dot. The presence of a metal nanoparticle nearby the quantum dot results in a self-action of the quantum dot via the metal …
Sensing and measurement tasks in severely adverse conditions such as loss, noise and dephasing can be improved by illumination with quantum states of light. Previous results have shown a modest reduction in the number of measurements necessary to achieve a given precision. Here, we compare three illumination strategies for estimating the relative phase in a noisy, lossy interferometer. When including a common phase fluctuation in the noise processes, we show that using an entangled probe achieves an advantage in parameter estimation precision that scales with the number of entangled modes. Thi…
We investigate the time-dependent Casimir-Polder potential of a polarizable two-level atom placed near a surface of arbitrary material, after a sudden change in the parameters of the system. Different initial conditions are taken into account. For an initially bare ground-state atom, the time-dependent Casimir-Polder energy reveals how the atom is "being dressed" by virtual, matter-assisted photons. We also study the transient behavior of the Casimir-Polder interaction between the atom and the surface starting from a partially dressed state, after an externally induced change in the atomic lev…
Successful implementation of several quantum information and communication protocols require distributing entangled pairs of quantum bits in reliable manner. While there exists a substantial amount of recent theoretical and experimental activities dealing with non-Markovian quantum dynamics, experimental application and verification of the usefulness of memory-effects for quantum information tasks is still missing. We combine these two aspects and show experimentally that a recently introduced concept of nonlocal memory effects allows to protect and distribute polarization entangled pairs of p…
We show that for some noisy channels, the optimal entanglement-assisted strategy depends on the noise level. We note that there is a non-trivial crossover between the parallel-entangled strategy and the ancilla-assisted strategy - in the former the probes are all entangled, the latter the probes are entangled with a noiseless ancilla but not amongst themselves. The transition can be explained by the fact that, separable states are more robust against noise and therefore are optimal in the high noise limit, but they are in turn outperformed by ancilla-assisted ones.
Starting from the Quantum-Phase-Estimate (QPE) algorithm, a method is proposed to construct entangled states that describe correlated many-body systems on quantum computers. Using operators for which the discrete set of eigenvalues is known, the QPE approach is followed by measurements that serve as projectors on the entangled states. These states can then be used as inputs for further quantum or hybrid quantum-classical processing. When the operator is associated to a symmetry of the Hamiltonian, the approach can be seen as a quantum--computer formulation of symmetry breaking followed by symm…
Plasmonics is a rapidly emerging platform for quantum state engineering with the potential for building ultra-compact and hybrid optoelectronic devices. Recent experiments have shown that despite the presence of decoherence and loss, photon statistics and entanglement can be preserved in single plasmonic systems. This preserving ability should carry over to plasmonic metamaterials, whose properties are the result of many individual plasmonic systems acting collectively, and can be used to engineer optical states of light. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of quantum state filtering…
Though the entanglement-assisted formalism provides a universal connection between a classical linear code and an entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code (EAQECC), the issue of maintaining large amount of pure maximally entangled states in constructing EAQECCs is a practical obstacle to its use. It is also conjectured that the power of entanglement-assisted formalism to convert those good classical codes comes from massive consumption of maximally entangled states. We show that the above conjecture is wrong by providing families of EAQECCs with an entanglement consumption rate that…
Quantum entanglement is a stunning consequence of the superposition principle. This universal property of quantum systems has been intensively explored with photons, atoms, ions and electrons. Collective excitations such as surface plasmons exhibit quantum behaviors. For the first time, we report an experimental evidence of non-local control of single plasmon interferences through entanglement of a single plasmon with a single photon. We achieved photon-plasmon entanglement by converting one photon of an entangled photon pair into a surface plasmon. The plasmon is tested onto a plasmonic platf…
We present two method for optimal entanglement concentration from pure entangled states by local actions only. However a prior knowledge of the Schmidt coefficients is required. The first method is optimally efficient only when a finite ensemble of pure entangled states are available whereas the second method realizes the single pair optimal concentration probability. We also propose an entanglement assisted method which is again optimally efficient even for a single pair. We also discuss concentrating entanglement from N-partite cat like states.
We experimentally demonstrate a proposal [Phys. Rev. A 87, 052325 (2013)] of a scheme for robust distribution of polarization entangled photon pairs over collective noisy channels having the reciprocity. Although the scheme employs the robustness of two qubit decoherence-free subspace, by utilizing the forward propagation of one half of the entangled photons and the backward propagation of a classical reference light, it achieves an entanglement-sharing rate proportional to the transmittance of the quantum channel for the signal photon. We experimentally observed the efficient sharing rate whi…
We propose a nonlocal entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for $N$-photon systems in a partially entangled W state, resorting to some ancillary single photons and the parity-check measurement based on cross-Kerr nonlinearity. One party in quantum communication first performs a parity-check measurement on her photon in an $N$-photon system and an ancillary photon, and then she picks up the even-parity instance for obtaining the standard W state. When she obtains an odd-parity instance, the system is in a less-entanglement state and it is the resource in the next round of entanglement conce…
We report on the feedback-optimized extraordinary optical transmission of continuous-variable entangled states through a hexagonal metal-hole array. The continuous-variable entanglements from a nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier are first demonstrated to survive after a photon-plasmon-photon conversion process. By controlling the reflected light from the metal-hole array, a significant enhancement of quantum correlations has then been experimentally achieved comparing to the case of without such coherent feedback control. This result presents a useful technique to efficiently recover t…
We propose a protocol where one can exploit dual quantum and classical channels to achieve perfect ``cloning'' and ``orthogonal-complementing'' of an unknown state with a minimal assistance from a state preparer (without revealing what the input state is). The first stage of the protocol requires usual teleportation and in the second stage, the preparer disentangles the left-over entangled states by a single particle measurement process and communicates a number of classical bits (1-cbit per copy) to different parties so that perfect copies and complement copies are produced. We discuss our pr…
A novel scheme is proposed to generate a maximally entangled state between two qubits by means of a dissipation-driven process. To this end, we entangle the quantum states of qubits that are mutually coupled by a plasmonic nanoantenna. Upon enforcing a weak spectral asymmetry in the properties of the qubits, the steady-state probability to obtain a maximally entangled, subradiant state approaches unity. This occurs despite the high losses associated to the plasmonic nanoantenna that are usually considered as being detrimental. The entanglement scheme is shown to be quite robust against variati…
Quantum superpositions and entanglement are at the heart of the quantum information science. There have been only a few investigations of these phenomena at the mesoscopic level, despite the fact that these systems are promising for quantum state storage and processing. Here we present two novel experiments with surface plasmons propagating on cm-long metallic stripe waveguides. We demonstrate that two plasmons can be entangled at remote places. In addition, we create a single plasmon in a temporal superposition state: it exists in a superposition of two widely separated moments. These quantum…
We theoretically investigate a possibility to establish multi-qubit quantum correlations in one-dimensional chains of qubits. We combine a reservoir engineering strategy with coherent dynamics to generate multi-qubit entangled states. We find that an interplay between the coherent and incoherent dynamics result in the generation of stable (time-independent) many-body entangled steady states. Our results will be relevant in the context of the dissipative generation of quantum states, with applications in short-distance quantum computation and for exploring the emergence of collective phenomena …
Plasmonics and metamaterials have recently been shown to allow the control and interaction with non-classical states of light, a rather counterintuitive finding given the high losses typically encountered in these systems. Here, we demonstrate a range of functionalities that are allowed with correlated and entangled photons that are used to illuminate multiple, overlaid patterns on plasmonic metasurfaces. Correlated photons allow to nonlocally determine the pattern that is imaged or, alternatively to un-scramble an image that is otherwise blurred. Entangled photons allow a more important funct…
In the past decades, quantum plasmonics has become an active area due to its potential applications in on-chip plasmonic devices for quantum information processing. However, the fundamental physical process, i.e., how a quantum state of light evolves in the photon-plasmon conversion process, has not been clearly understood. Here, we report a complete characterization of the plasmon-assisted extraordinary optical transmission process through quantum process tomography. By inputting various coherent states to interact with the plasmonic structure and detecting the output states with a homodyne d…
