Metasurface for complete measurement of polarization Bell state

Abstract

Bell state measurement is vital to quantum information technology. Conventional linear optical elements, however, cannot fully distinguish all polarization Bell states without assisting of additional degrees of freedom. Leveraging on a pair of binary-pixel metasurfaces, we demonstrate direct measurement of all four polarization Bell states. Each metasurface is designed to produce two output modes that linearly superpose three Bell states in the coincidence counting measurement. By rotating the polarizers, the coincidence counting measurement achieves a tunable anticorrelation between one and the other two Bell states, achieving Bell state detection efficiency of 75% in a single measurement. Complete and deterministic Bell state measurement is further realized by performing two measurements. Our work shows the advantage of utilization of metasurfaces in quantum detection schemes and is of great applicative interest for quantum dense coding, entanglement swapping, quantum teleportation protocols, and novel quantum information processing tasks.