Entanglement of Orbital Angular Momentum in Non-Sequential Double Ionization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates and quantifies entanglement of orbital angular momentum in two photoelectrons from non-sequential double ionization, offering a practical approach for experimental detection and potential applications in imaging and quantum information.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify and detect OAM entanglement in NSDI, using an entanglement witness and strong-field approximation, applicable to mixed states and robust against incoherent effects.

Findings

Entanglement of OAM in photoelectrons is demonstrated and quantified.

The entanglement is robust to incoherent effects like focal averaging.

Optimal targets and parameters for experimental detection are identified.

Abstract

We demonstrate entanglement between the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of two photoelectrons ionized via the strongly correlated process of non-sequential double ionization (NSDI). Due to the quantization of OAM, this entanglement is easily quantified and has a simple physical interpretation in terms of conservation laws. We explore detection by an entanglement witness, decomposable into local measurements, which strongly reduces the difficulty of experimental implementation. We compute the logarithmic negativity measure, which is directly applicable to mixed states, to demonstrate that the entanglement is robust to incoherent effects such as focal averaging. Using the strong-field approximation, we quantify the entanglement for a large range of targets and field parameters, isolating the best targets for experimentalists. The methodology presented here provides a general way to use OAM to quantify and, in principle, measure entanglement, that is well-suited to attosecond processes, can enhance our understanding and may be exploited in imaging processes or the generation of OAM-entangled electrons.