Quantum entanglement

All our former experience with application of quantum theory seems to say: {\it what is predicted by quantum formalism must occur in laboratory}. But the essence of quantum formalism - entanglement, recognized by Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and Schr\"odinger - waited over 70 years to enter to laboratories as a new resource as real as energy. This holistic property of compound quantum systems, which involves nonclassical correlations between subsystems, is a potential for many quantum processes, including ``canonical'' ones: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and dense coding. However, it appeared that this new resource is very complex and difficult to detect. Being usually fragile to environment, it is robust against conceptual and mathematical tools, the task of which is to decipher its rich structure. This article reviews basic aspects of entanglement including its characterization, detection, distillation and quantifying. In particular, the authors discuss various manifestations of entanglement via Bell inequalities, entropic inequalities, entanglement witnesses, quantum cryptography and point out some interrelations. They also discuss a basic role of entanglement in quantum communication within distant labs paradigm and stress some peculiarities such as irreversibility of entanglement manipulations including its extremal form - bound entanglement phenomenon. A basic role of entanglement witnesses in detection of entanglement is emphasized.Comment: 110 pages, 3 figures, ReVTex4, Improved (slightly extended) presentation, updated references, minor changes, submitted to Rev. Mod. Phys

Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping

Motivated by the question, which kind of physical interactions and processes are needed for the production of quantum entanglement, Peres has put forward the radical idea of delayed-choice entanglement swapping. There, entanglement can be "produced a posteriori, after the entangled particles have been measured and may no longer exist". In this work we report the first realization of Peres' gedanken experiment. Using four photons, we can actively delay the choice of measurement-implemented via a high-speed tunable bipartite state analyzer and a quantum random number generator-on two of the photons into the time-like future of the registration of the other two photons. This effectively projects the two already registered photons onto one definite of two mutually exclusive quantum states in which either the photons are entangled (quantum correlations) or separable (classical correlations). This can also be viewed as "quantum steering into the past"