Experimental investigation of enviroment--induced entanglement using an all--optical setup

TL;DR

This paper experimentally explores how an environment can induce entanglement between two non-interacting qubits encoded in optical degrees of freedom, using an all-optical setup to simulate reservoir effects and measure entanglement.

Contribution

It presents a novel all-optical experimental method to generate and measure environment-induced entanglement between two qubits encoded in light.

Findings

Entanglement can be generated via environment interaction.

Experimental results agree with theoretical predictions.

Efficient measurement of entanglement using intensity measurements.

Abstract

We investigate the generation of entanglement between two non interacting qubits coupled to a common reservoir. An experimental setup was conceived to encode one qubit on the polarization of an optical beam and another qubit on its transverse mode. The action of the reservoir is implemented as conditional operations on these two qubits, controlled by the longitudinal path as an ancillary degree of freedom. An entanglement witness and the two-qubit concurrence are easily evaluated from direct intensity measurements showing an excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction.