Abstract
Quantum Entanglement is widely regarded as one of the most prominent features of quantum mechanics and quantum information science. Although, photonic entanglement is routinely studied in many experiments nowadays, its signature has been out of the grasp for real-time imaging. Here we show that modern technology, namely triggered intensified charge coupled device (ICCD) cameras are fast and sensitive enough to image in real-time the effect of the measurement of one photon on its entangled partner. To quantitatively verify the non-classicality of the measurements we determine the detected photon number and error margin from the registered intensity image within a certain region. Additionally, the use of the ICCD camera allows us to demonstrate the high flexibility of the setup in creating any desired spatial-mode entanglement, which suggests as well that visual imaging in quantum optics not only provides a better intuitive understanding of entanglement but will improve applications of quantum science.
Similar content being viewed by others
Introduction
Entanglement in quantum mechanics describes correlations between at least two systems that are stronger than classically explainable1,2,3. A prominent system to create and analyse quantum entanglement is the photonic system. Single photons have the experimental advantage to offer different degrees of freedom which are rather simple to address and investigate. A fairly young but vibrant field that studies the spatial structure of the optical modes of photons (e.g. Laguerre-Gauss4, Ince-Gauss5, Bessel-Gauss6) continues to attract wide interest. Each spatial mode offers many interesting features, like orbital angular momentum7 or continuous vortex splitting8, which already lead to novel insights in quantum optics like higher dimensional entanglement9,10,11,12, novel uncertainty relations for the angular and OAM degree-of-freedom13,14, remote object identification15 or angular sensitivity enhancement with very high OAM16.
The rapid progress in imaging technologies over the last few years has made CCD cameras an interesting option for single photon detection in quantum optics experiments, since the spatial information is directly accessible. Due to high detection efficiencies, electron multiplied CCD cameras have attracted attention recently and have been used to show non-classical correlations from photons produced via spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC)17,18,19,20. The downside of such cameras is that they only allow relatively long exposure times (μs) which makes it necessary to sum over many images with a sparse number of photons and makes it unfeasible to use them for coincidence imaging of entanglement. In contrast, ICCD cameras have lower quantum efficiencies due to the intensifier and fluorescence screen in front of the CCD chip but show a very good signal to noise ratio and therefore good single photon sensitivity. They have been used to illustrate non-classical effects of the photons from the SPDC process21,22,23,24,25. However, the biggest advantage of ICCD cameras is the very fast (~2 ns) and precise (~10 ps) optical gating of the intensifier which makes it possible to use them in a coincidence scheme for real-time imaging of quantum entanglement.
Results
In our experiment, we use a combination of the polarization and spatial degree-of-freedom (DOF) to be able to directly image entanglement. We start with a high-fidelity polarization-entangled two-photon state (Figure 1). One photon is unchanged; the other photon is brought to a second setup, which transfers the polarization DOF to a wide range of specifically chosen spatial mode. In this interferometric setup16, the photons get transferred by a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator, dependent on their polarization (methods), to a hybrid-entangled two-photon state
where α, β and φ are real and α2 + β2 = 1, H and V denote the horizontal and vertical polarization, spM1 and spM2 correspond to arbitrary spatial modes and the positions of the ket-vectors label the different photons. In order to image the created spatial mode and demonstrate entanglement between the two photons, the polarization encoded photon is projected onto a certain polarization and detected by a single photon detector. The signal from the detector is used as a trigger for the ICCD camera, which in turn registers the transferred photon.
In our measurements, we use an ICCD (Andor iStar A-DH334T-18F-03) with a quantum efficiency of 3% for 810 nm wavelength, a gating of 5 ns and a spatial resolution of 1024 × 1024 pixels (effective pixel size: 13 × 13 μm). With this camera we observe clear single-photon images even for very complex mode structures (Figure 2 c and Figure 4), where the whole spatial information is directly available with a very high precision. Compared to scanning or masking of single-pixel detectors, direct imaging with an ICCD also shortens the measurement time significantly. Thus, the advantage of real-time imaging with an ICCD is an improvement - both spatially and temporally - of many orders of magnitude, opening up possible novel applications in quantum information and quantum metrology. Note that similar ICCD cameras with 20% efficiency and 2 ns gating, which are readily available, promise a 20-fold increase in the signal to noise ratio. Since the adjustable insertion delay time for triggering the ICCD is at least 35 ns, we delay the second photon with a fibre before sending it through the transfer setup. If a wrong delay is chosen nearly no accidental photon events can be seen at the camera (see Figure 2 b) and hence no background correction has to be applied. This suggests the possibility for precise measurements in the temporal domain. A few residual events appear due to the high triggering rate (MHz) and the resulting thermal noise from the intensifier and from the afterglowing of the fluorescing phosphorous screen. We find the ratio between the number of detected photon events in a picture (right delay) to the residual events (wrong delay) to be on the order of 75 : 1. Those undesirable residual events may be suppressed substantially, with more efficient ICCD cameras and/or smaller gating times.
To image the effect of entanglement, we scan the Poincaré sphere of the polarization encoded trigger photon and register the appearing mode pattern from the transferred photons at the ICCD camera. In this way, we are able to visualize directly the probability distribution of complex spatial modes of the whole Bloch sphere (Figure 2 a). Because the measurement time to image each spatial mode is very short, the influence of the polarization measurement of the first photon is visible in real-time at the ICCD camera (Supplementary Movie 1). In the movie the frames were recorded with a rate of 0.3 Hz, which could be speed up to the maximal frame rate of 4 Hz of the ICCD camera. Entanglement is already visible in this video, since the high-contrast minima and maxima shift in very good correspondence to the polarization angle measured on the partner photon.
While visual observation already intuitively confirms the presence of entanglement, we also verify it quantitatively: Since the registered signal of the camera depends linearly on the detected photon number, we determine the average signal per detected photon and its error margin from many single photon events (see Methods for more information). With this relation between registered signal and corresponding photon number it is possible to spatially analyse any recorded intensity image without the need for individual counting of single photons over a time consuming data acquisition of many sparse images.
To confirm entanglement we make use of a specific feature of the Laguerre-Gauss (LG) mode family. The spatial structure of two superimposed LG modes with opposite helicities shows a radially symmetric distribution where a change of the phase ϕ between the two modes directly translates to a spatial rotation of . To discriminate between different orientations of the structure and therefore different superpositions, we evaluate the photon number per angular region from the measured intensity image for different trigger polarizations (Figure 3 a and b). From the maximal and minimal detected photon numbers the visibilities in two mutually unbiased bases and therefore the expectation value of an entanglement witness operator can be calculated26 (Supplementary Information). For all separable states the inequality
holds and surpassing this bound verifies entanglement. Capital letters stand for the polarization of the trigger photon (D = diagonal, A = anti-diagonal, R = right circular, L = left circular). For first order LG modes with l = ±1 we obtained a value of 1.68 ± 0.03 which violates the inequality (2) by more than 20 standard deviations, therefore proving entanglement. For LG±2, LG±3, LG±5 and LG±10 the measured witnesses are 1.53 ± 0.05, 1.50 ± 0.05, 1.50 ± 0.04 and 1.46 ± 0.05 respectively and thus violate the bound for separable states by around 10 standard deviations. We note that no background subtraction was applied, but the measured photon numbers from the registered signal of the ICCD might be a bit smaller than they were in the actual measurement, due to saturation effects where a lot of photons are registered in the same region of the camera, namely the maxima. However, a bigger actual photon number in the maximum would correspond to a higher value of the visibility and therefore a stronger violation than the one presented here.
Recently, it was shown that hybrid-entangled two-photon states of higher-order LG modes can be used to improve sensitivity in the remote sensing of an angular rotation16. By using an ICCD camera to image the mode patterns it is possible to visualize this gear-like behaviour between the rotation of the polarization and the petal structure of the spatial mode without any masking and its inherent significant reduction in count rates. In contrast to the experiment in Ref. 16, this significantly shortens the acquisition time. A scan of the polarization around the equator of the trigger photons' Poincare sphere leads to a rotation of the structure by 180° for LG±1, 90° for LG±2 and 36° for LG±5 (Supplementary Movie 2).
Furthermore, the capability of the ICCD camera of resolving complex spatial pattern with a very high precision enables the first demonstration of the high flexibility of the presented setup. If transferring one of the photons to the Hermite-Gauss (HG) mode family or the general family of Ince-Gauss (IG) modes, all registered single-photon images show a very good agreement with the theoretical prediction (Figure 4 a and b). Additionally, it is possible to create entanglement between polarization and an artificial mixture of two different mode families at the same time, here a superposition of a higher order LG and higher order HG mode (Figure 4c). Since no mask is required the imaging with an ICCD camera is a very general way to measure entanglement of any spatial mode or complex pattern of single photons which might advance quantum optics experiments where information is encoded in the spatial domain.
Discussion
Our results represent the first imaging of entanglement in real-time, where the influence of the measurement of one system on its entangled, distant partner system is directly visible. The use of an ICCD camera to evaluate the number of photons from a registered intensity within a given region opens up new experimental possibilities to determine more efficiently the structure and properties of spatial modes from only single intensity images. The presented results suggest that triggered ICCD cameras will advance quantum optics and quantum information experiments where complex structures of single photons need to be investigated with high spatio-temporal resolution.
Methods
Source and spatial light modulator (SLM)
The polarization-entangled photon pairs were created in a SPDC process using a 15 mm-long type-II nonlinear crystal (periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (ppKTP)) in a Sagnac-type configuration27,28. A blue 405 nm continuous-wave diode laser with up to 35 mW of power pumps the crystal and thereby creates photon pairs of 810 nm wavelength. Two 3 nm band-pass filters were used before the photons were coupled into single-mode fibers. With this approximately 1.3 million pairs per second can be detected at full pump power. Any polarization change between the source and the transfer setup is undone by fiber polarization controllers. The SLM (resolution: 1920 × 1080, pixel size: 8 μm, Holoeye Photonics AG) in the transfer setup, which modulates only the phase of the light, was used to create the desired spatial modes.
Evaluation of the photon number
The registered intensity at the ICCD camera is read out as a signal in counts per pixel, which does linearly depend on a specific photon number. In order to evaluate the photon number corresponding to a registered intensity, we need to know the average signal caused by a single photon. For this purpose we analyse around 5800 detected single photon events to get a statistically significant mean value. In each shot we subtracted at first the camera-induced readout noise (mean background) of each pixel. In a second step, we summed up all signal counts of a contiguous pixel array as one photon where at least one pixel value is more than 5 standard deviations above the background fluctuations. This has to be done since the photons are spread over a few pixels due to different resolutions of the intensifier and the CCD pixel size (see insets in Figure 5a). With the mean value it is now possible to determine the number of photons which correspond to detected signal counts within a certain region of the intensity image. To evaluate the error margin for each photon number, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation based on the obtained probability distribution from the single photon measurements (Figure 5a). A very good fit to the resulting histogram of the distribution was found to be a log-normal probability function. With this distribution 50000 possible signal counts were simulated for each photon number. The resulting average signal for every photon number corresponds to the one obtained with the mean value from the single photon events. The thereby found standard deviation can now be used as a look-up table to determine the error margin of each photon number. The linear dependence of registered signal on the photon number as well as the standard deviation is shown in Figure 5 and was used to demonstrate the non-classical behaviour (Figure 3 a and b in the main text) and demonstrate entanglement quantitatively by violating the bound of an entanglement witness (equation (2)).
References
Einstein, A., Podolsky, B. & Rosen, N. Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete? Phys. Rev. 47, 777–780 (1935).
Bell, J. S. On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox. Physics 1, 195–200 (1965).
Horodecki, R., Horodecki, P., Horodecki, M. & Horodecki, K. Quantum entanglement. Rev. Mod. Phys. 81, 865–942 (2009).
Mair, A., Vaziri, A., Weihs, G. & Zeilinger, A. Entanglement of the orbital angular momentum states of photons. Nature 412, 313–316 (2001).
Krenn, M. et al. Entangled singularity patterns of photons in Ince-Gauss modes. Phys. Rev. A 87, 012326 (2013).
McLaren, M. et al. Entangled Bessel-Gaussian beams. Optics Express 20, 21, 23589–23597 (2012).
Allen, L., Beijersbergen, M. W., Spreeuw, R. J. C. & Woerdman, J. P. Orbital angular momentum of light and the transformation of Laguerre-Gaussian laser modes. Phys. Rev. A 45, 8185–8189 (1992).
Bandres, M. A. & Gutiérrez-Vega, J. Ince Gaussian beams. Optics Letters 29, 144–146 (2004).
Vaziri, A., Weihs, G. & Zeilinger, A. Experimental two-photon, three-dimensional entanglement for quantum communication. Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 240401 (2002).
Langford, N. K. et al. Measuring entangled qutrits and their use for quantum bit commitment. Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 053601 (2004).
Dada, A. C., Leach, J., Buller, G. S., Padgett, M. J. & Andersson, E. Experimental high-dimensional two-photon entanglement and violations of generalized Bell inequalities. Nature Physics 7, 677–680 (2011).
Salakhutdinov, V. D., Eliel, E. R. & Löffler, W. Full-field quantum correlations of spatially entangled photons. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 173604 (2012).
Jack, B. et al. Demonstration of the angular uncertainty principle for single photons. Journal of Optics 13, 064017 (2011).
Leach, J. et al. Quantum correlations in optical angle–orbital angular momentum variables. Science 329, 662–665 (2010).
Uribe-Patarroyo, N., Fraine, A., Simon, D. S., Minaeva, O. & Sergienko, A. V. Object identification using correlated orbital angular momentum states. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 043601 (2013).
Fickler, R. et al. Quantum entanglement of high angular momenta. .Science 338, 640–643 (2012).
Blanchet, J.-L., Devaux, F., Furfaro, L. & Lantz, E. Measurement of sub-shot-noise correlations of spatial fluctuations in the photon-counting regime. Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 233604 (2008).
Brida, G., Genovese, M. & Ruo Berchera, I. Experimental realization of sub-shot-noise quantum imaging. Nature Photonics 4, 227–230 (2010).
Moreau, P.-A., Mougin-Sisini, J., Devaux, F. & Lantz, E. Realization of the purely spatial Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in full-field images of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Phys. Rev. A 86, 010101 (2012).
Edgar, M. P. et al. Imaging high-dimensional spatial entanglement with a camera. Nature Communications 3, 984 (2012).
Jost, B. M., Sergienko, A. V., Abouraddy, A. F., Saleh, B. E. A. & Teich, M. C. Spatial correlations of spontaneously down-converted photon pairs detected with a single-photon-sensitive CCD camera. Optics Express 3, 2, 81–88 (1998).
Abouraddy, A. F., Nasr, M. B., Saleh, B. E. A., Sergienko, A. V. & Teich, M. C. Demonstration of the complementarity of one- and two-photon interference. Phys. Rev. A 63, 063803 (2001).
Jedrkiewicz, O. et al. Detection of sub-shot-noise spatial correlation in high-gain parametric down conversion. Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 243601 (2004).
Di Lorenzo Pires, H., Monken, C. H. & van Exter, M. P. Direct measurement of transverse-mode entanglement in two-photon states. Phys. Rev. A 80, 022307 (2009).
Aspden, R. S., Tasca, D. S., Boyd, R. W. & Padgett, M. J. Heralded single-photon ghost imaging. arXiv:1212.5059 (2012) <http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5059>.
Gühne, O. & Tóth, G. Entanglement detection. Physics Reports 474, 1–75 (2009).
Kim, T., Fiorentino, M. & Wong, F. N. C. Phase-stable source of polarization-entangled photons using a polarization Sagnac interferometer. Phys. Rev. A 73, 012316 (2006).
Fedrizzi, A., Herbst, T., Poppe, A., Jennewein, T. & Zeilinger A. A wavelength-tunable fiber-coupled source of narrowband entangled photons. Optics Express 15, 23, 15377–15386 (2007).
López-Mariscal, C. & Gutiérrez-Vega, J. C. Propagation of helical Hermite-Gaussian beams. SPIE Annual Meeting, SPIE Vol. 6663: Laser Beam Shaping VIII, 666307 (2007).
Acknowledgements
The authors thank T. Pieper and LOT-QuantumDesign for providing the camera. This work was supported by the European Research Council (advanced grant QIT4QAD, 227844) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Special Research Program (SFB) Foundations and Applications of Quantum Science (FoQuS; Project No. F4006-N16) and W1210-2 (Vienna Doctoral Program on Complex Quantum Systems; CoQuS).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
R.F. designed and built the experiment, collected and analysed the data and wrote the manuscript. R.L. and S.R. participated in designing and building of the experiment. M.K. and S.R. assisted on the theoretical side and the simulation analysis. The project was supervised by A.Z. All authors contributed to conceiving the experiment, discussing the results and contributing to the final text of the manuscript.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Electronic supplementary material
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Material
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Movie 1
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Movie 2
Rights and permissions
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
About this article
Cite this article
Fickler, R., Krenn, M., Lapkiewicz, R. et al. Real-Time Imaging of Quantum Entanglement. Sci Rep 3, 1914 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01914
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01914
This article is cited by
-
Description Abilities of Quantum Image States and Their Applications
International Journal of Theoretical Physics (2022)
-
Generation, characterization, and manipulation of quantum correlations in electron beams
npj Quantum Information (2021)
-
Advances in high-dimensional quantum entanglement
Nature Reviews Physics (2020)
-
Fast camera spatial characterization of photonic polarization entanglement
Scientific Reports (2020)
-
Imaging with quantum states of light
Nature Reviews Physics (2019)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.