Energy-Time Entangled Qutrits: Bell Tests and Quantum Communication
Rob Thew, Sébastien Tanzilli, A. Acín, Hugo Zbinden, N. Gisin · Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) · 2004
Abstract. We have developed a scheme to generate, control, transmit and measure entangled photonic qutrits (two photons each of dimension d = 3). A Bell test of this source has previously been reported elsewhere [1], therefore, here we focus on how the control of the system is realized. Motivated by these results, we outline how the scheme can be used for two specific quantum protocols, namely key distribution and coin tossing and discuss some of their advantages and disadvantages. Performing quantum communication with high-dimensional systems would appear to be an obvious and straightforward extension to many of the qubit protocols that have driven quantum information science in recent years. There have been theoretical proposals for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) [2] with greater security [3] as well as specific proposals for qutrits such as quantum coin tossing [4]. Fundamentally, high-dimensional Bell inequalities have revealed greater violations of non-locality [5] while increasing the dimensions of the entangled systems has been shown to facilitate closing the detection loop-hole [6] for such tests. Optics has been able to provide a realistic test-bed for these proposals with several different schemes being realized for generating high-dimensional entanglement [7, 8] as well as the scheme presented here [1, 9]. This source of entangled qutrits is analogous to the energy-time qubit arrangement of Franson [10]. The experimental scheme has been developed for telecom wavelengths and with proven long distance quantum communication architecture [11, 12] to optimise the usefulness of this high dimensional entanglement resource. We have already performed