Quantum coherence of thermal biphoton orbital angular momentum state and its distribution in non-Kolmogorov atmospheric turbulence

Abstract

Quantum coherence has been considered as a resource for quantum information process in recent years. Sharing the quantum resource distantly is a precondition for quantum communication. In this paper, we explore the quantum coherence properties of the prepared state starting from initially incoherent thermal light source. It is shown that the quantum coherence is directly proportional to the dimension of Hilbert space and therefore employ the orbital angular momentum (OAM) to encode resources. The distribution of biphoton thermal OAM state via the one-sided noisy channel (non-Kolmogorov turbulent atmosphere) is then investigated. It is found that the prepared OAM state can have large amount of quantum coherence, which is maximized when the thermal source is completely incoherent. The turbulence effects on quantum coherence are studied and compared to those on the fidelity and quantum channel capacity. Contrasting to the monotonic decay, the dynamics of coherence displays a peak during the propagation and the mechanism behind is presented. Finally, the dynamics of quantum thermal state can be more robust than that of Bell-like pure state since more interference can be induced. We believe our results is of importance to OAM quantum communication using quantum coherence as a resource.