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Experimental extraction of an entangled photon pair from two identically decohered pairs

Nature volume 421, pages 343–346 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Entanglement is considered to be one of the most important resources in quantum information processing schemes, including teleportation1,2,3, dense coding4 and entanglement-based quantum key distribution5. Because entanglement cannot be generated by classical communication between distant parties, distribution of entangled particles between them is necessary. During the distribution process, entanglement between the particles is degraded by the decoherence and dissipation processes that result from unavoidable coupling with the environment. Entanglement distillation and concentration schemes6,7,8,9 are therefore needed to extract pairs with a higher degree of entanglement from these less-entangled pairs; this is accomplished using local operations and classical communication. Here we report an experimental demonstration of extraction of a polarization-entangled photon pair from two decohered photon pairs. Two polarization-entangled photon pairs are generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and then distributed through a channel that induces identical phase fluctuations to both pairs; this ensures that no entanglement is available as long as each pair is manipulated individually. Then, through collective local operations and classical communication we extract from the two decohered pairs a photon pair that is observed to be polarization-entangled.

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Figure 1: The schematic diagram of our experiment.
Figure 2: Experimental set-up for the polarization-entangled photon-pair source.
Figure 3: Experimental results showing that PPC decoheres individual pairs.
Figure 4: Experimental results showing that the extracted photon pair is entangled.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Nagata, K. Tamaki, A. Miranowicz and J. Shimamura for helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Advanced Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Hayama, 240-0193, Kanagawa, Japan

    Takashi Yamamoto, Masato Koashi, Şahin Kaya Özdemir & Nobuyuki Imoto

  2. CREST Interacting Carrier Electronics Project, 4-1-8 Honmachi, Kawaguchi, 331-0012, Japan

    Takashi Yamamoto, Masato Koashi, Şahin Kaya Özdemir & Nobuyuki Imoto

  3. NTT Basic Research Laboratories, NTT Corporation, 3-1 Morinosato-Wakamiya, Atsugi, 243-0198, Japan

    Nobuyuki Imoto

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  1. Takashi Yamamoto
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Correspondence to Nobuyuki Imoto.

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Yamamoto, T., Koashi, M., Özdemir, Ş. et al. Experimental extraction of an entangled photon pair from two identically decohered pairs. Nature 421, 343–346 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01358

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