Polarization control of single photon quantum orbital angular momentum states

Abstract

The orbital angular momentum of photons, being defined in an infinitely dimensional discrete Hilbert space, offers a promising resource for high-dimensional quantum information protocols in quantum optics. The biggest obstacle to its wider use is presently represented by the limited set of tools available for its control and manipulation. Here, we introduce and test experimentally a series of simple optical schemes for the coherent transfer of quantum information from the polarization to the orbital angular momentum of single photons and vice versa. All our schemes exploit a newly developed optical device, the so-called "q-plate", which enables the manipulation of the photon orbital angular momentum driven by the polarization degree of freedom. By stacking several q-plates in a suitable sequence, one can also access to higher-order angular momentum subspaces. In particular, we demonstrate the control of the orbital angular momentum $m$ degree of freedom within the subspaces of $|m|=2\hslash$ and $|m|=4\hslash$ per photon. Our experiments prove that these schemes are reliable, efficient and have a high fidelity.

9 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Beating the channel capacity limit for linear photonic superdense coding
• Generation of Hyperentangled Photons Pairs
• Quantum information transfer from spin to orbital angular momentum of photons
• Hypergeometric-Gaussian Modes
• Pancharatnam-Berry phase optical elements for wavefront shaping in the visible domain: switchable helical modes generation
• Efficient generation and sorting of orbital angular momentum eigenmodes of light by thermally tuned q-plates
• Experimental demonstration of fractional orbital angular momentum entanglement of two photons
• Light propagation in a birefringent plates with topological charge
• How to create and detect N-dimensional entangled photons with an active phase hologram
• Spin-induced angular momentum switching

Cited by in corpus (30)

• Polarization pattern of vector vortex beams generated by $q$-plates with different topological charges
• Complete experimental toolbox for alignment-free quantum communication
• Angular Momentum Transfer in Interaction of Laguerre-Gaussian Beams with Atoms and Molecules
• Experimental implementation of a Kochen-Specker set of quantum tests
• Quantum and classical separability of spin-orbit laser modes
• Experimental generation and characterization of single-photon hybrid ququarts based on polarization-orbital angular momentum encoding
• Generation of hybrid polarization-orbital angular momentum entangled states
• Hybrid ququart-encoded quantum cryptography protected by Kochen-Specker contextuality
• Single-photon spin-orbit entanglement violating a Bell-like inequality
• Implementation of one-dimensional quantum walks on spin-orbital angular momentum space of photons
• Time-division multiplexing of the orbital angular momentum of light
• Quantum teleportation in the spin-orbit variables of photon pairs
• Real-time imaging of spin-to-orbital angular momentum quantum state teleportation
• Achromatic orbital angular momentum generator
• Generation of vector beams with liquid crystal disclination lines
• Orbital angular momentum based intra- and inter- particle entangled states generated via a quantum dot source
• Experimental observation of impossible-to-beat quantum advantage on a hybrid photonic system
• Hardy's paradox tested in the spin-orbit Hilbert space of single photons
• Deterministic qubit transfer between orbital and spin angular momentum of single photons
• Quantum Walk with a four-dimensional coin
• Efficient generation and control of different order orbital angular momentum states for communication links
• Remote information concentration and multipartite entanglement in multilevel systems
• Resilience of orbital angular momentum qubits and effects on hybrid entanglement
• Liquid crystal spatial-mode converters for the orbital angular momentum of light
• Spin and Orbital angular momentum propagation in anisotropic media: theory
• Photon Self-Induced Spin to Orbital Conversion in TGG crystal at high laser power
• Three-qubit topological phase on entangled photon pairs
• Quantum probabilities from quantum entanglement: Experimentally unpacking the Born rule
• Time-Spatial Mode Selective Quantum Frequency Converter
• Laser-induced radial birefringence and spin-to-orbital optical angular momentum conversion in silver-doped glasses