Demonstrating multipartite entanglement of single-particleWstates: Linear optical schemes

Abstract

We present two linear optical schemes using nonideal photodetectors to demonstrate inseparability of W-type N-partite entangled states containing only a single photon. First, we show that the pairwise entanglement of arbitrary two modes chosen from N optical modes can be detected using the method proposed by Nha and Kim [Phys. Rev. A 74, 012317 (2006)], thereby suggesting the full inseparability among N parties. In particular, this scheme is found to succeed for any nonzero quantum efficiency of photodetectors. Second, we consider a quantum teleportation network using linear optics without auxiliary modes. The conditional teleportation can be optimized by a suitable choice of the transmittance of the beam splitter in the Bell measurement. Specifically, we identify the conditions under which maximum fidelity larger than classical bound 2/3 is achieved only in cooperation with other parties. We also investigate the case of on-off photodetectors that cannot discriminate the number of detected photons.