# Free-Space Entangled Quantum Carpets

## TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate entangled quantum carpets using spatially entangled photon pairs and optical devices, enabling testing of high-dimensional Bell inequalities and potential adaptation to matter wave systems.

## Contribution

It introduces an optical scheme to produce free-propagating entangled quantum carpets and demonstrates their use in testing D-dimensional Bell inequalities.

## Key findings

- Violation of Bell inequality depends on initial spatial correlations.
- Numerical simulations confirm the feasibility of entangled quantum carpets.
- The scheme can potentially be adapted to matter wave experiments.

## Abstract

The Talbot effect in quantum physics is known to produce intricate patterns in the probability distribution of a particle, known as "quantum carpets", corresponding to the revival and replication of the initial wave function. Recently, it was shown that one can encode a $D$-level qudit, in such a way that the Talbot effect can be used to process the $D$-dimensional quantum information [Far\'{\i}as et al, PRA (2015)]. Here we introduce a scheme to produce free-propagating "entangled quantum carpets" with pairs of photons produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. First we introduce an optical device that can be used to synthesize arbitrary superposition states of Talbot qudits. Sending spatially entangled photon pairs through a pair of these devices produces an entangled pair of qudits. As an application, we show how the Talbot effect can be used to test a $D$-dimensional Bell inequality. Numerical simulations show that violation of the Bell inequality depends strongly on the amount of spatial correlation in the initial two-photon state. We briefly discuss how our optical scheme might be adapted to matter wave experiments.