Amazing stuff!
"... Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated so far for a wide variety of particles and for their various properties.
For photons, particles of light, entanglement can exist for their direction of travel, frequency (color), or the direction in which their electric field points. It can also exist for properties that are harder to imagine, such as angular momentum. ...
In a study published in the journal Nature, the Technion researchers discovered that it is possible to entangle photons in nanoscale systems that are a thousandth the size of a hair, but the entanglement is not carried out by the conventional properties of the photon, such as spin or trajectory, but only by the total angular momentum. ..."
From the abstract:
"Photons can carry angular momentum, which is conventionally attributed to two constituents—spin angular momentum (SAM), which is an intrinsic property related to the polarization, and orbital angular momentum (OAM), which is related to the photon spatial distribution.
In paraxial optics, these two forms of angular momentum are separable, such that entanglement can be induced between the SAM and the OAM of a single photon or of different photons in a multi-photon state.
In nanophotonic systems, however, the SAM and the OAM of a photon are inseparable, so only the total angular momentum (TAM) serves as a good quantum number.
Here we present the observation of non-classical correlations between two photons in the near-field regime, giving rise to entanglement related to the TAM.
We entangle those nanophotonic states by coupling photon pairs to plasmonic modes and use quantum imaging techniques to measure their correlations.
We observe that entanglement in TAM leads to a completely different structure of quantum correlations of photon pairs, compared with entanglement related to the two constituent angular momenta.
This work paves the way for on-chip quantum information processing using the TAM of photons as the encoding property for quantum information."
Technion Researchers Discover a New Type of Quantum Entanglement (original news release) "A groundbreaking study from the Technion unveils a newly discovered form of quantum entanglement in the total angular momentum of photons confined in nanoscale structures – just a thousandth the width of a human hair. This discovery could play a key role in the future miniaturization of quantum communication and computing components"
Near-field photon entanglement in total angular momentum (no public access)
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