2013/12/04 by Robert Fickler, Radek Łapkiewicz, Radek Lapkiewicz +2 · 90 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Biology #Optics #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Photon #Photon entanglement #Photon polarization #Physics #Polarization (electrochemistry) #Quantum #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum entanglement #Quantum mechanics #Transverse plane #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.89.060301
published in Physical Review A 89(6) (American Physical Society)
arxiv created 2013/12/04 · openalex publication_date 2014/06/11 · arxiv updated 2014/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report the efficient creation and detection of hybrid entanglement between one photon's polarization and another photon's complex transverse polarization pattern including various polarization singularities. The polarization measurement of the first photon triggers a polarization-sensitive imaging of its partner photon, the vector photon, using a single-photon-sensitive camera. Thereby, the vector photon's complex polarization pattern is reconstructed tomographically dependent on the type of polarization measurement performed on its partner. To evaluate the quality of the observed patterns, we introduce a fidelity-like measure which compares the reconstructed polarization with the theoretically expected one at every transverse spatial position. We find that the measured polarization patterns and the theory overlap by more than 90%. Moreover, we visualize the varying strengths of polarization entanglement for different transverse regions and demonstrate an interesting phenomenon: Each vector photon can be both entangled and not entangled in polarization with its partner photon. We give an intuitive, information-theoretical explanation for our results. Our results pave the way to study quantum properties of the rich field of such complex light modes with the potential to improve various applications in quantum informational tasks.