Hyperentanglement concentration for polarization–spatial–time-bin hyperentangled photon systems with linear optics

Abstract

Hyperentanglement has significant applications in quantum information processing. Here we present an efficient hyperentanglement concentration protocol (hyper-ECP) for partially hyperentangled Bell states simultaneously entangled in polarization, spatial-mode and time-bin degrees of freedom (DOFs) with the parameter-splitting method, where the parameters of the partially hyperentangled Bell states are known to the remote parties. In this hyper-ECP, only one remote party is required to perform some local operations on the three DOFs of a photon, only the linear optical elements are considered, and the success probability can achieve the maximal value. Our hyper-ECP can be easily generalized to concentrate the N-photon partially hyperentangled Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger states with known parameters, where the multiple DOFs have largely improved the channel capacity of long-distance quantum communication. All of these make our hyper-ECP more practical and useful in high-capacity long-distance quantum communication.