2017/10/04 by Matthew Reichert, Hugo Defienne, Reichert, Matthew +3 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #FOS: Physical sciences #Image Processing Techniques and Applications #Optics (physics.optics) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1710.01781
openalex publication_date 2017/10/04 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Quantum entangled states of light are essential for quantum technologies and\nfundamental tests of physics. While quantum information science has relied on\nsystems with entanglement in 2D degrees of freedom, e.g. quantum bits with\npolarization states, the field is moving towards ever-higher dimensions of\nentanglement. Increasing the dimensionality enhances the channel capacity and\nsecurity of quantum communication protocols, gives rise to exponential speed-up\nof quantum computation, and is necessary for quantum imaging. Yet,\ncharacterization of even bipartite quantum states of high-dimensional\nentanglement remains a prohibitively time-consuming challenge, as the\ndimensionality of the joint Hilbert space scales quadratically with the number\nof modes. Here, we develop and experimentally demonstrate a new, more complete\ntheory of detection in CCD cameras for rapid measurement of the full joint\nprobability distribution of high-dimensional quantum states. The theory spans\nthe intensity range from low photon count to saturation of the detector, while\nthe massive parallelization inherent in the pixel array makes measurements\nscale favorably with dimensionality. The results accurately account for partial\ndetection and electronic noise, resolve the paradox of ignoring two-photon\ndetection in a single pixel despite collinear spatial entanglement, and reveal\nthe full Hilbert space for exploration. For example, use of a megapixel array\nallows measurement of a joint Hilbert space of 1012 dimensions, with a speed-up\nof nearly four orders of magnitude over traditional methods. We demonstrate the\nmethod with pairs, but it generalizes readily to arbitrary numbers of entangled\nphotons. The technique uses standard geometry with existing technology, thus\nremoving barriers of entry to quantum imaging experiments, and open previously\ninaccessible regimes of high-dimensional quantum optics.\n