Optimal quantum cloning of orbital angular momentum photon qubits via Hong-Ou-Mandel coalescence

Abstract

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, associated with a helical structure of the wavefunction, has a great potential for quantum photonics, as it allows attaching a higher dimensional quantum space to each photon. Hitherto, however, the use of OAM has been hindered by its difficult manipulation. Here, exploiting the recently demonstrated spin-OAM information transfer tools, we report the first observation of the Hong-Ou-Mandel coalescence of two incoming photons having nonzero OAM into the same outgoing mode of a beam-splitter. The coalescence can be switched on and off by varying the input OAM state of the photons. Such effect has been then exploited to carry out the 1 \rightarrow 2 universal optimal quantum cloning of OAM-encoded qubits, using the symmetrization technique already developed for polarization. These results are finally shown to be scalable to quantum spaces of arbitrary dimension, even combining different degrees of freedom of the photons.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Beating the channel capacity limit for linear photonic superdense coding
• State-independent experimental test of quantum contextuality
• Shaping the Phase of a Single Photon
• Quantum communication without alignment using multiple-qubit single-photon states
• Enhancing the Violation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Local Realism by Quantum Hyper-entanglement

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Spin-orbit hybrid entanglement of photons and quantum contextuality
• Experimental optimal cloning of four-dimensional quantum states of photons
• 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
• Implementation of one-dimensional quantum walks on spin-orbital angular momentum space of photons
• Resilience of orbital angular momentum qubits and effects on hybrid entanglement