Anisotropically high entanglement of biphotons generated in spontaneous parametric down conversion

We show that the wave packet of a biphoton generated via spontaneous parametric down conversion is strongly anisotropic. Its anisotropic features manifest themselves very clearly in comparison of measurements performed in two different schemes: when the detector scanning plane is perpendicular or parallel to the plane containing the crystal optical axis and the laser axis. The first of these two schemes is traditional whereas the second one gives rise to such unexpected new results as anomalously strong narrowing of the biphoton wave packet measured in the coincidence scheme and very high degree of entanglement. The results are predicted theoretically and confirmed experimentally

Angular Schmidt Modes in Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion

We report a proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating that appropriately chosen set of Hermite-Gaussian modes constitutes a Schmidt decomposition for transverse momentum states of biphotons generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down conversion. We experimentally realize projective measurements in Schmidt basis and observe correlations between appropriate pairs of modes. We perform tomographical state reconstruction in the Schmidt basis, by direct measurement of single-photon density matrix eigenvalues.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Projective filtering of a single spatial radiation eigenmode

Lossless filtering of a single coherent (Schmidt) mode from spatially multimode radiation is a problem crucial for optics in general and for quantum optics in particular. It becomes especially important in the case of nonclassical light that is fragile to optical losses. An example is bright squeezed vacuum generated via high-gain parametric down conversion or four-wave mixing. Its highly multiphoton and multimode structure offers a huge increase in the information capacity provided that each mode can be addressed separately. However, the nonclassical signature of bright squeezed vacuum, photon-number correlations, are highly susceptible to losses. Here we demonstrate lossless filtering of a single spatial Schmidt mode by projecting the spatial spectrum of bright squeezed vacuum on the eigenmode of a single-mode fiber. Moreover, we show that the first Schmidt mode can be captured by simply maximizing the fiber-coupled intensity. Importantly, the projection operation does not affect the targeted mode and leaves it usable for further applications.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Learning the tensor network model of a quantum state using a few single-qubit measurements

The constantly increasing dimensionality of artificial quantum systems demands for highly efficient methods for their characterization and benchmarking. Conventional quantum tomography fails for larger systems due to the exponential growth of the required number of measurements. The conceptual solution for this dimensionality curse relies on a simple idea - a complete description of a quantum state is excessive and can be discarded in favor of experimentally accessible information about the system. The probably approximately correct (PAC) learning theory has been recently successfully applied to a problem of building accurate predictors for the measurement outcomes using a dataset which scales only linearly with the number of qubits. Here we present a constructive and numerically efficient protocol which learns a tensor network model of an unknown quantum system. We discuss the limitations and the scalability of the proposed method.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure