Experimental investigation on the geometry of GHZ states

• Main Authors: Gonzalo Carvacho, Francesco Graffitti, Vincenzo D’Ambrosio, Beatrix C. Hiesmayr, Fabio Sciarrino
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017-10-01
• Series: Scientific Reports
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-13124-6

Abstract Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states and their mixtures exhibit fascinating properties. A complete basis of GHZ states can be constructed by properly choosing local basis rotations. We demonstrate this experimentally for the Hilbert space $${{\mathbb{C}}}_{2}^{\otimes 4}$$ ℂ 2 ⊗ 4 by entangling two photons in polarization and orbital angular momentum. Mixing GHZ states unmasks different entanglement features based on their particular local geometrical connectedness. In particular, a specific GHZ state in a complete orthonormal basis has a “twin” GHZ state for which equally mixing leads to full separability in opposition to any other basis-state. Exploiting these local geometrical relations provides a toolbox for generating specific types of multipartite entanglement, each providing different benefits in outperforming classical devices. Our experiment investigates these GHZ’s properties exploiting the HMGH framework which allows us to study the geometry for the different depths of entanglement in our system and showing a good stability and fidelity thus admitting a scaling in degrees of freedom and advanced operational manipulations.