Malcolm N. O'Sullivan

We present a novel method for efficient sorting of photons prepared in states of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and angular position (ANG). A log-polar optical transform is used in combination with a holographic beam-splitting method to achieve better mode discrimination and reduced cross-talk than reported previously. Simulating this method for 7 modes, we have calculated an improved mutual information of 2.43 bits/photon and 2.29 bits/photon for OAM and ANG modes respectively. In addition, we present preliminary results from an experimental implementation of this technique. This method is expected to have important applications for high-dimensional quantum key distribution systems.

We present a novel method for efficient sorting of photons prepared in states of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and angular position (ANG). A log-polar optical transform is used in combination with a holographic beam-splitting method to achieve better mode discrimination and reduced cross-talk than reported previously. Simulating this method for 7 modes, we have calculated an improved mutual information of 2.43 bits/photon and 2.29 bits/photon for OAM and ANG modes respectively. In addition, we present preliminary results from an experimental implementation of this technique. This method is expected to have important applications for high-dimensional quantum key distribution systems.

Nondegenerate-wavelength (or two-color) ghost imaging using either thermal or quantum light sources is studied theoretically. We demonstrate that a high-quality ghost image can be obtained even when the wavelengths of light used in the object and reference arms are very different. The spatial resolution of the ghost image is found in general to depend on each of these wavelengths, although in many practical situations it depends primarily on the wavelength used to illuminate the object. The resolution of nondegenerate-wavelength thermal ghost imaging can be higher than that of its quantum counterpart despite the fact that the photons have the same degree of spatial correlation in the two cases.

A technique for conditionally creating single- or multimode photon-number states is analyzed using Bayesian theory. We consider the heralded N-photon states created from the photons produced by an unseeded optical parametric amplifier when the heralding detector is the time-multiplexed photon-number-resolving detector recently demonstrated by Fitch, et al. [Phys. Rev. A 68, 043814 (2003).] and simultaneously by Achilles, et al. [Opt. Lett. 28, 2387 (2003).]. We find that even with significant loss in the heralding detector, fields with sub-Poissonian photon-number distributions can be created. We also show that heralded multimode fields created using this technique are more robust against detector loss than are single-mode fields.

We demonstrate a simple experimental method for creating entangled qudits. Using transverse-momentum and position entanglement of photons emitted in spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we show entanglement between discrete regions of space, i.e., pixels. We map each photon onto as many as six pixels, where each pixel represents one level of our qudit state. The method is easily generalizable to create even higher dimensional, entangled states. Thus, the realization of quantum information processing in arbitrarily high dimensions is possible, allowing for greatly increased information capacity.