High-dimensional biphoton states are promising resources for quantum applications, ranging from high-dimensional quantum communications to quantum imaging. A pivotal task is fully characterizing these states, which is generally time-consuming and not scalable when projective measurement approaches are adopted; however, new advances in coincidence imaging technologies allow for overcoming these limitations by parallelizing multiple measurements. Here we introduce biphoton digital holography, in analogy to of-axis digital holography, where coincidence imaging of the superposition of an unknown state with a reference state is used to perform quantum state tomography. We apply this approach to single photons emitted by spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal when the pump photons possess various quantum states. The proposed reconstruction technique allows for a more efficient (three orders of magnitude faster) and reliable (an average fidelity of 87%) characterization of states in arbitrary spatial modes bases, compared with previously performed experiments. Multiphoton digital holography may pave the route toward efficient and accurate computational ghost imaging and high-dimensional quantum information processing.
This article is in collaboration with the University of Ottawa involving Prof. Ebrahim Karimi, Dr. Alessio D’Errico, and Nazanin Deghan and it was produced at the Advanced Research Complex (ARC) facility.News about its publication can be also found at the following links:
– News from Phys.org (ENG):https://phys.org/news/2023-08-visualizing-mysterious-quantum-entanglement-photons.html
– News from ANSA (ITA): https://www.ansa.it//canale_scienza/notizie/fisica_matematica/2023/08/24/osservato-il-misterioso-abbraccio-dei-quanti-_6f2816c9-a5a1-482a-bff2-6517c4ac5a4b.html