Miguel A. Larotonda

Noisy quantum teleportation: An experimental study on the influence of local environments

We report experimental results on the action of selected local environments on the fidelity of the quantum teleportation protocol, taking into account non-ideal, realistic entangled resources. Different working conditions are theoretically identified, where a noisy protocol can be made almost insensitive to further addition of noise. We put to test these conditions on a photonic implementation of the quantum teleportation algorithm, where two polarization entangled qubits act as the entangled resource and a path qubit on Alice encodes the state to be teleported. Bobs path qubit is used to implement a local environment, while the environment on Alices qubit is simulated as a weighed average of different pure states. We obtain a good agreement with the theoretical predictions, we experimentally recreate the conditions to obtain a noise-induced enhancement of the protocol fidelity, and we identify parameter regions of increased insensibility to interactions with specific noisy environments.

Entanglement-breaking channels and entanglement sudden death

The occurrence of entanglement sudden death in the evolution of a bipartite system depends on both the initial state and the channel responsible for the evolution. An extreme case is that of entanglement braking channels, which are channels that acting on only one of the subsystems drives them to full disentanglement regardless of the initial state. In general, one can find certain combinations of initial states and channels acting on one or both subsystems that can result in entanglement sudden death or not. Neither the channel nor the initial state, but their combination, is responsible for this effect, but their combination. In this work we show that, in all cases, when entanglement sudden death occurs, the evolution can be mapped to that of an effective entanglement breaking channel on a modified initial state. Our results allow to anticipate which states will suffer entanglement sudden death or not for a given evolution. An experiment with polarization entangled photons demonstrates the utility of this result in a variety of cases.

Manipulating transverse modes of photons for quantum cryptography

Several schemes have been proposed to extend quantum key distribution protocols aimed at improving their security or at providing new physical substrates for qubit implementation. We present a toolbox to jointly create, manipulate, and measure qubits stored in polarization and transverse-modes degrees of freedom of single photons. The toolbox includes local operations on single qubits, controlled operations between the two qubits, and projective measurements over a wide variety of nonlocal bases in the four-dimensional space of states. We describe how to implement the toolbox to perform an extended version of the BB84 protocol for this Hilbert space (ideally transmitting two key bits per photon). We present the experimental implementation of the measurement scheme both in the regimes of intense light beams and with single photons. Thus, we show the feasibility of implementing the protocol, providing an interesting example of a method for quantum information processing using the polarization and transverse modes of light as qubits.

Active polarization stabilization in a single mode optical fiber link for quantum communications

En este trabajo se presenta el desarrollo de un sistema de estabilización activa de la polarización de un enlace de fibra óptica monomodo, basado en dos controladores de polarización manejados por voltaje, y se estudia su desempeño. El objetivo es contar con un enlace que preserve los estados de polarización para su uso en un sistema de distribución cuántica de claves. El esquema es capaz de generar los cuatro estados de polarización lineales generadores de dos bases conjugadas: una corresponde a las direcciones definidas por un separador de haz polarizante integrado a fibra, ubicado en un extremo del enlace y la otra a la base conjugada lineal. Posteriormente y en forma activa compensa los cambios de la birrefringencia del canal inducidos por variaciones térmicas o mecánicas inducidas por el entorno, que naturalmente deterioran la elección inicial de bases en tiempos del orden de algunos minutos en enlaces subterráneos o submarinos. Se muestran resultados del funcionamiento del sistema en régimen de detección de luz intensa con fotodiodos en modo fotoconductivo, y resultados preliminares en régimen de fotoconteo, utilizando un módulo de conteo de fotones.

Experimental investigation of local environment effects on the quantum teleportation fidelity

Quantum teleportation relies on entanglement as the quantum resource to be able to communicate with fidelities beyond the classical limit. Nevertheless, the entangled resource may be afflicted by local noise, affecting its ability to serve as the entangled resource for quantum teleportation. We obtain experimental data on the influence of different local environments on the ability of an initially entangled pair of qubits to act as a teleportation resource, after it has been disturbed by noise. We generate selected conditions on the noise parameter space, both theoretically and experimentally, and we find that an already noisy protocol can be made practically insensitive to a further addition of noise. The experimental results are based on a photonic implementation of the quantum teleportation algorithm, with a polarization-entangled pair acting as the quantum resource. The state to be teleported is an additional qubit encoded in the path internal degree of freedom of Alices photon. Interactions with different local environments on both sides of the system are either implemented with an extra qubit as the environment, or simulated as a weighed average of pure states. We compare our experimental results with the theoretical predictions, and by performing quantum process tomography we can calculate the fidelity of the quantum teleportation scheme and evaluate the effect of local environments.