An-Ning Zhang

Experimental demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation.

Quantum-mechanical entanglement of three or four particles has been achieved experimentally, and has been used to demonstrate the extreme contradiction between quantum mechanics and local realism. However, the realization of five-particle entanglement remains an experimental challenge. The ability to manipulate the entanglement of five or more particles is required for universal quantum error correction. Another key process in distributed quantum information processing, similar to encoding and decoding, is a teleportation protocol that we term ‘open-destination’ teleportation. An unknown quantum state of a single particle is teleported onto a superposition of N particles; at a later stage, this teleported state can be read out (for further applications) at any of the N particles, by a projection measurement on the remaining particles. Here we report a proof-of-principle demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation (for N = 3). In the experiment, we use two entangled photon pairs to generate a four-photon entangled state, which is then combined with a single-photon state. Our experimental methods can be used for investigations of measurement-based quantum computation and multi-party quantum communication.

Experimental Realization of Entanglement Concentration and a Quantum Repeater

We report an experimental realization of entanglement concentration using two polarization-entangled photon pairs produced by pulsed parametric down-conversion. In the meantime, our setup also provides a proof-in-principle demonstration of a quantum repeater. The quality of our procedure is verified by observing a violation of Bells inequality by more than 5 standard deviations. The high experimental accuracy achieved in the experiment implies that the requirement of tolerable error rate in multistage realization of quantum repeaters can be fulfilled, hence providing a useful toolbox for quantum communication over large distances.

Experimental demonstration of a nondestructive controlled-NOT quantum gate for two independent photon qubits.

Universal logic gates for two quantum bits (qubits) form an essential ingredient of quantum information processing. However, photons, one of the best candidates for qubits, suffer from a lack of strong nonlinear coupling, which is required for quantum logic operations. Here we show how this drawback can be overcome by reporting a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of a nondestructive controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate for two independent photons using only linear optical elements in conjunction with single-photon sources and conditional dynamics. Moreover, we exploit the CNOT gate to discriminate all four Bell states in a teleportation experiment.

Experimental quantum secret sharing and third-man quantum cryptography.

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) and third-man quantum cryptography (TQC) are essential for advanced quantum communication; however, the low intensity and fragility of the multiphoton entanglement source in previous experiments have made their realization an extreme experimental challenge. Here, we develop and exploit an ultrastable high intensity source of four-photon entanglement to report an experimental realization of QSS and TQC. The technology developed in our experiment will be important for future multiparty quantum communication.

Experimental violation of local realism by four-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger entanglement.

We report the first experimental violation of local realism by four-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entanglement. In the experiment, the nonstatistical GHZ conflicts between quantum mechanics and local realism are confirmed, within the experimental accuracy, by four specific measurements of polarization correlations between four photons. In addition, our experimental results also demonstrate a strong violation of Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko inequality by 76 standard deviations. Such a violation can only be attributed to genuine four-photon entanglement.

Experimental realization of optimal asymmetric cloning and telecloning via partial teleportation.

We report an experimental realization of both optimal asymmetric cloning and telecloning of single photons by making use of partial teleportation of an unknown state. In the experiment, we demonstrate that, conditioned on the success of partial teleportation of single photons, not only the optimal asymmetric cloning can be accomplished, but also one of two outputs can be transferred to a distant location, realizing the telecloning. The experimental results represent a novel way to achieve quantum cloning and may have potential applications in the context of quantum communication.

Experimental quantum error rejection for quantum communication.

We report an experimental demonstration of a bit-flip error-rejection protocol for error-reduced transfer of quantum information through a noisy quantum channel. In the experiment, an unknown state to be transmitted is encoded into a two-photon entangled state, which is then sent through an engineered noisy quantum channel. At the final stage, the unknown state is decoded by a parity measurement, successfully rejecting the erroneous transmission over the noisy quantum channel.

Experimental violation of Bell's inequality beyond Tsirelson's bound.

The correlations between two qubits belonging to a three-qubit system can violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt-Bell inequality beyond Tsirelsons bound [A. Cabello, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 060403 (2002)]. We experimentally demonstrate such a violation by 7 standard deviations by using a three-photon polarization-entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state produced by Type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion. In addition, using part of our results, we obtain a violation of the Mermin inequality by 39 standard deviations.

Experimental manipulation of five-photon entanglement

We report the experimental manipulation of five-photon entanglement. In the experiment, we first generate a high intensity and ultra-stable source of entangled photons and then used two pairs of entangled photons to produce a four-photon entangled state. After combining it with a single-photon state, we are able to engineer a five-photon entangled state. Meanwhile, by manipulating these entangled states, we have also successfully demonstrated the open-destination quantum teleportation, and a distant nondestructive Controlled-NOT gate for quantum teleportation.