Imaging high-dimensional spatial entanglement with a camera

Abstract

The light produced by parametric down-conversion shows strong spatial entanglement that leads to violations of EPR criteria for separability. Historically, such studies have been performed by scanning a single-element, single-photon detector across a detection plane. Here we show that modern electron-multiplying charge-coupled device cameras can measure correlations in both position and momentum across a multi-pixel field of view. This capability allows us to observe entanglement of around 2,500 spatial states and demonstrate Einsteinĝ€"Podolskyĝ€"Rosen type correlations by more than two orders of magnitude. More generally, our work shows that cameras can lead to important new capabilities in quantum optics and quantum information science. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.