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Phys. Rev. A 75, 050101(R) (2007) [4 pages]

Transverse entanglement migration in Hilbert space

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K. W. Chan1, J. P. Torres2, and J. H. Eberly3
1The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA
2ICFO-Institut de Ciències Fotóniques, and Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
3Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA

Received 21 August 2006; revised 5 February 2007; published 9 May 2007

We show that, although the amount of mutual entanglement of photons propagating in free space is fixed, the type of correlations between the photons that determine the entanglement can dramatically change during propagation. We show that this amounts to a migration of entanglement in Hilbert space, rather than real space. For the case of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, the migration of entanglement in transverse coordinates takes place from modulus to phase of the biphoton state and back again. We propose an experiment to observe this migration in Hilbert space and to determine the full entanglement.

© 2007 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.75.050101
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevA.75.050101
PACS:
03.65.Ud, 03.67.Mn, 42.65.Lm