Resilience of hybrid optical angular momentum qubits to turbulence

Abstract

Recent schemes to encode quantum information into the total angular momentum of light, defining rotation-invariant hybrid qubits composed of the polarization and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom, present interesting applications for quantum information technology. However, there remains the question as to how detrimental effects such as random spatial perturbations affect these encodings. Here, we demon- strate that alignment-free quantum communication through a turbulent channel based on hybrid qubits can be achieved with unit transmission fidelity. In our experiment, alignment-free qubits are produced with q-plates and sent through a homemade tur- bulence chamber. The decoding procedure, also realized with q-plates, relies on both degrees of freedom and renders an intrinsic error-filtering mechanism that maps errors into losses.

9 pages, 7 figures. published in Scientific Reports

References in corpus (6)

• Optical spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion in inhomogeneous anisotropic media
• Complete experimental toolbox for alignment-free quantum communication
• Influence of Atmospheric Turbulence on Optical Communications using Orbital Angular Momentum for Encoding
• Quantum communication without alignment using multiple-qubit single-photon states
• Two-photon wave mechanics
• Infinitesimal propagation equation for decoherence of an OAM entangled biphoton in atmospheric turbulence

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Orbital angular momentum of photons and the entanglement of Laguerre-Gaussian modes
• Turbulence-induced persistence in laser beam wandering
• Quantum-optical Description of Phase Conjugation of Vector Vortex Beams in Stimulated Parametric Down Conversion
• Time-Spatial Mode Selective Quantum Frequency Converter