Since quantum physics was introduced in the beginning of 20th century, this new paradigm of science has developed human technology. Whereas, even the nano-scale (nano-meter sized) electronics is being used in the 21th century, the current information ...
Since quantum physics was introduced in the beginning of 20th century, this new paradigm of science has developed human technology. Whereas, even the nano-scale (nano-meter sized) electronics is being used in the 21th century, the current information technology is still based on classical information science. Two decades ago, physicists started to study the next generation of information science, so-called quantum information science (information science based on quantum theory). This new information science is based on peculiar quantum principles: superposition of quantum states and entanglement. In this thesis, I experimentally study quantum information science in both fundamental and practical aspects based on photonic systems.
On the first part of the thesis, I discuss how to detect entanglement of quantum states based on the partial transpose. Entanglement is considered as a key resource for implementing quantum information protocols such as quantum computation and quantum communications. Hence, determining whether a certain quantum state is entangled or not is one of the most important issues in quantum information science. One way to detect entanglement is applying the partial transpose to quantum states, however, the partial transpose is not a physical operation, meaning that it cannot be realized in a laboratory. In order to bypass this problem, I implement the approximated form of the transpose and the partial transpose based on the structural physical approximation. In addition, I demonstrate the experimental entanglement detection using this approximated partial transpose operation.
On the second part of the thesis, I discuss the characteristics of general ized quantum measurements. In general, measurement process does not need to change the physical systems in classical physics; however, extracting information about the quantum systems of interest by quantum measurement process inevitably affects the quantum states. In quantum measurement theory, as the information gain by measurement increases, the state disturbance becomes larger, while the reversibility becomes smaller. Hence, the fundamental trade-off relations among the information gain, the state disturbance, and the reversibility are naturally introduced. Here, I implement the optimal measurements giving the maximum information gain with either the minimum state disturbance (the minimum disturbance measurement, MDM) or the maximum reversibility (the maximum reversibility measurement, XRM). In addition, interestingly, I experimentally demonstrate that the XRM is necessary condition for the MDM.
On the last part of the thesis, I study various kinds of decoherence mechanisms, and propose various methods to suppress decoherence. Decoherence causes loss of entanglement and coherence, thus, it is an obstacle for practical quantum information processing and needs to be suppressed. First of all, I experimentally demonstrate the amplitude damping decoherence can be effectively suppressed by using a pair of weak and reversing measurements (types of the generalized measurements). Based on this scheme, I show that entanglement sudden death can be avoided, and the exchange symmetry of the local operations on entangled states is broken by decoherence. Then, I propose another decoherence suppression scheme using quantum transduction, and I experimentally demonstrate that two-qubit entangled states are not affected by decoherence and still preserve the initial entanglement after transmitting through either of amplitude damping or polarization mode dispersion decoherence. Finally, I calculate how polarization mode dispersion decoherence affects the two-photon polarization entangled state, which are prepared via spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) process. I find that the bandwidths of the pump and the down-converted photons are important parameters of the entanglement degradation behavior.