This research line is developed by exploiting the Q-plates which are devices able to manipulate actively the coupling between the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light with the spin angular momentum (SAM) of photons.
Photons in such beams exhibit a form of single-particle quantum entanglement between different degrees of freedom. In particular, light beams having a vectorial field structure or polarization, that varies over the transverse profile and a central optical singularity, are called Vector Vortex Beams (VVB) and may present specific properties.
The application of Q-plates and hence of the single-particle entanglement have already found applications in areas ranging from microscopy to metrology, optical trapping, nano-optics, and quantum communication. In particular Q-plates represents a valid tool in the task of engineering arbitrary quantum states as recently demonstrated within our group.
Selected publications
- V. D’Ambrosio, G. Carvacho, I. Agresti, L. Marrucci, F. Sciarrino. Tunable Two-Photon Quantum Interference of Structured Light. Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 013601 (2019).
- T. Giordani, E. Polino, S. Emiliani, A. Suprano, L. Innocenti, H. Majury, L. Marrucci, M. Paternostro, A. Ferraro, N. Spagnolo, F. Sciarrino. Experimental Engineering of Arbitrary Qudit States with Discrete-time Quantum Walks. Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 020503 (2019).
- V. Parigi, V. D’Ambrosio, C. Arnold, L. Marrucci, F. Sciarrino & J. Laurat. Storage and retrieval of vector beams of light in a multiple-degree-of-freedom quantum memory. Nature Communications 6, 7706 (2015).
- V. D’Ambrosio, N. Spagnolo, L. Del Re, S. Slussarenko, Y. Li, L. C. Kwek, L. Marrucci, S. P. Walborn, L. Aolita, F. Sciarrino. Photonic polarization gears for ultra-sensitive angular measurements. Nature Communications 4, 2432 (2013).
- E. Nagali, F. Sciarrino, F. De Martini, L. Marrucci, B. Piccirillo, E. Karimi, E. Santamato. Quantum Information Transfer from Spin to Orbital Angular Momentum of Photons. Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 013601 (2009).
Related project
NQSTI – National Quantum Science & Technology Institute
PNRR Partenariato PE4