Distillation of photon entanglement using a plasmonic metamaterial

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that plasmonic metamaterials can be used to distill highly entangled photon states from less entangled ones, advancing on-chip quantum state engineering despite decoherence and loss.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental demonstration of quantum state filtering using a plasmonic metamaterial for entanglement distillation.

Findings

Metamaterials can distill entanglement from less entangled states.

Photon entanglement can be preserved in plasmonic systems.

Potential for integrated on-chip quantum devices.

Abstract

Plasmonics is a rapidly emerging platform for quantum state engineering with the potential for building ultra-compact and hybrid optoelectronic devices. Recent experiments have shown that despite the presence of decoherence and loss, photon statistics and entanglement can be preserved in single plasmonic systems. This preserving ability should carry over to plasmonic metamaterials, whose properties are the result of many individual plasmonic systems acting collectively, and can be used to engineer optical states of light. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of quantum state filtering, also known as entanglement distillation, using a metamaterial. We show that the metamaterial can be used to distill highly entangled states from less entangled states. As the metamaterial can be integrated with other optical components this work opens up the intriguing possibility of incorporating plasmonic metamaterials in on-chip quantum state engineering tasks.