New paper published in Physical Review Research

Quantum coherence marks a deviation from classical physics, and has been studied as a resource for metrology and quantum computation. Finding reliable and effective methods for assessing its presence is then highly desirable. Coherence witnesses rely on measuring observables whose outcomes can guarantee that a state is not diagonal in a known reference basis. Here, we experimentally measure a type of coherence witness that uses pairwise state comparisons to identify superpositions in a basis-independent way. Our experiment uses a single interferometric setup to simultaneously measure the three pairwise overlaps among three single-photon states via Hong-Ou-Mandel tests. Aside from coherence witnesses, we show the measurements also serve as a Hilbert-space dimension witness. Our results attest to the effectiveness of pooling many two-state comparison tests to ascertain various relational properties of a set of quantum states.

Witnesses of coherence and dimension from multiphoton indistinguishability tests,
Taira Giordani, Chiara Esposito, Francesco Hoch, Gonzalo Carvacho, Daniel J. Brod, Ernesto F. Galvão, Nicolò Spagnolo, and Fabio Sciarrino, Phys. Rev. Research 3, 023031 (2021) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023031