Experimental Quantum Measurement with a Few Photons
Lee A. Rozema · TSpace (University of Toronto) · 2014
This thesis presents the results of a series of four photonic experiments on the topic of quantum measurement. The first two experiments relate to quantum metrology, and the use of quantum states to increase the precision of measurements beyond what is possible with classical systems; first to detect and characterize decoherence, and then in the context of quantum imaging. The third experiment studies a fundamental question in quantum mechanics: "How much must a quantum system be disturbed by a measurement?". We use weak measurement to confirm a recent theoretical result, showing that if a particle's state is already sufficiently uncertain we can perform a measurement with very little disturbance -- contrary to common explanations of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The fourth experiment falls in the category of quantum computation. In quantum mechanics having multiple copies of an identical system allows us to extract more information than we can extract from a single copy (since quantum mechanics allows each system to be measured only once before collapsing). We present and experimentally implement a quantum algorithm to compress all of the "extractable information" present in an ensemble of identical copies of quantum bits into exponentially fewer quantum bits. The research presented here samples from a variety of topics in quantum information, showing in several contexts how fascinating quantum effects can be exploited to gain a "quantum enhancement".To enable these experiments two sources of entangled photons were built, and "hybrid" quantum systems (encoding information in multiple degrees of freedom of a photon) were used to implement quantum circuits. This thesis will present the details of one of these sources (a novel and practical source of entangled N00N states), which was used in a four-photon quantum metrology experiment. The other, more standard, source of polarization-entangled photon pairs will only briefly be reviewed to leave room for the discussion of hybrid quantum logic.