Polarization diversity phase modulator for measuring frequency-bin entanglement of a biphoton frequency comb in a depolarized channel.

Abstract

Phase modulation has emerged as a technique to create and manipulate high-dimensional frequency-bin entanglement. A necessary step to extending this technique to depolarized channels, such as those in a quantum networking environment, is the ability to perform phase modulation independent of photon polarization. This is also necessary to harness hyperentanglement in the polarization and frequency degrees of freedom for operations such as Bell state discrimination. However, practical phase modulators are generally sensitive to the polarization of light, and this makes them unsuited to such applications. We overcome this limitation by implementing a polarization diversity scheme to measure frequency-bin entanglement for arbitrary orientations of co- and cross-polarized time-energy entangled photon pairs.