Bidirectional Mapping between a Biphoton Polarization State and a Single-Photon Two-Qubit State

Abstract

How to manipulate (operate or measure) single photons efficiently and simply is the basic problem in optical quantum information processing. We first present an efficient scheme to transform a biphoton polarization state to a corresponding single-photon state encoded by its polarization and spatial modes. This single-photon state carries both the information of the controlled and target photons. It will make the realization of bipartite positive-operator-valued measurements efficiently and simply. Moreover, the inverse transformation from the single-photon state back to the corresponding biphoton polarization state is also proposed. Using both the transformations, the realization of the arbitrary two-qubit unitary operation is simple with an M-Z interferometer. All the schemes are feasible with the current experimental technology.