Abstract
We show that a configuration of four birefringent crystals and wave-plates can emulate almost any arbitrary unital channel for polarization qubits encoded in single photons, where the channel settings are controlled by the wave-plate angles. The scheme is applied to a single spatial mode and its operation is independent of the wavelength and the fine temporal properties of the input light. We implemented the scheme and demonstrated its operation by applying a dephasing environment to classical and quantum single-photon states with different temporal properties. The applied process was characterized by a quantum process tomography procedure, and a high fidelity to the theory was observed.
Highlights
The wave-like nature of a quantum system is manifested by the existence of a well defined phase between its components
We examined the properties of the points that are in the vicinity of the edges, and found that an approximation to the dephasing channel is obtained for the following relation between the three HWPs angles of the four-crystal scheme: θ1
We investigated a controllable photonic dephasing channel of a single spatial mode that is composed of four birefringent crystals and wave-plates
Summary
The wave-like nature of a quantum system is manifested by the existence of a well defined phase between its components. Unlike dephasing schemes that are composed of one or more birefringent crystals in a fixed orientation, the four crystal configuration has the advantage that its dephasing magnitude is known in advance and is not affected by the details of the temporal structure, such as the coherence time of the initial photonic wave-packet This property was verified by applying the dephasing scheme to two photonic states that differ in their temporal properties. A complementary study of the temporal differences between the two photonic wave-packets that was performed using a Soleil-Babinet Compensator (SBC) is presented in the appendix
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