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Entanglement of photons in their dual wave-particle nature

Wave-particle duality is the most fundamental description of the nature of a quantum object, which behaves like a classical particle or wave depending on the measurement apparatus. On the other hand, entanglement represents nonclassical correlations of composite quantum systems, being also a key res...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Rab, Adil S., Polino, Emanuele, Man, Zhong-Xiao, Ba An, Nguyen, Xia, Yun-Jie, Spagnolo, Nicolò, Lo Franco, Rosario, Sciarrino, Fabio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688178/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29030635
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01058-6
Descripción
Sumario:Wave-particle duality is the most fundamental description of the nature of a quantum object, which behaves like a classical particle or wave depending on the measurement apparatus. On the other hand, entanglement represents nonclassical correlations of composite quantum systems, being also a key resource in quantum information. Despite the very recent observations of wave-particle superposition and entanglement, whether these two fundamental traits of quantum mechanics can emerge simultaneously remains an open issue. Here we introduce and experimentally realize a scheme that deterministically generates entanglement between the wave and particle states of two photons. The elementary tool allowing this achievement is a scalable single-photon setup which can be in principle extended to generate multiphoton wave-particle entanglement. Our study reveals that photons can be entangled in their dual wave-particle behavior and opens the way to potential applications in quantum information protocols exploiting the wave-particle degrees of freedom to encode qubits.