Orchestrating time and color: a programmable source of high-dimensional entanglement

TL;DR

This paper presents a programmable source of high-dimensional entangled temporal mode states in photonic quantum systems, enabling customizable quantum information encoding with up to 20 dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces a spectrally shaped pump pulse technique to generate maximally entangled TM states with controllable dimensionality for quantum information applications.

Findings

Generated entangled TM states with up to 20 dimensions.

Characterized the states using second-order correlation functions.

Demonstrated programmability of the entangled states' dimensionality.

Abstract

High-dimensional encodings based on temporal modes (TMs) of photonic quantum states provide the foundations for a highly versatile and efficient quantum information science (QIS) framework. Here, we demonstrate a crucial building block for any QIS applications based on TMs: a programmable source of maximally entangled high-dimensional TM states. Our source is based on a parametric down-conversion process driven by a spectrally shaped pump pulse, which facilitates the generation of maximally entangled TM states with a well-defined dimensionality that can be chosen programmatically. We characterize the effective dimensionality of the generated states via measurements of second-order correlation functions and joint spectral intensities, demonstrating the generation of bi-photon TM states with a controlled dimensionality in up to 20 dimensions.