Abstract
Quantum mechanics is now a mature topic dating back more than a century. During its scientific development, it fostered many technological advances that now are integrated into our everyday lives. More recently, over the past few decades, the authors have seen the emergence of a second quantum revolution, ushering in control of quantum states. Here, the spatial modes of light, “patterns of light,” hold tremendous potential: light is weakly interacting and so an attractive avenue for exploring entanglement preservation in open systems, while spatial modes of light offer a route to high dimensional Hilbert spaces for larger encoding alphabets, promising higher information capacity per photon, better security, and enhanced robustness to noise. Yet, progress in harnessing high dimensional spatial mode entanglement remains in its infancy. Here, the authors review the recent progress in this regard, outlining the core concepts in a tutorial manner before delving into the advances made in creation, manipulation, and detection of such quantum states. The authors cover advances in using orbital angular momentum as well as vectorial states that are hybrid entangled, combining spatial modes with polarization to form an infinite set of two-dimensional spaces: multidimensional entanglement. The authors highlight the exciting work in pushing the boundaries in both the dimension and the photon number, before finally summarizing the open challenges, and the questions that remain unanswered.
Highlights
Progress in harnessing high dimensional spatial mode entanglement remains in its infancy
We note that there are some open challenges with regard to high dimensional spatial mode entanglement
In all cases where spatial light modulators (SLMs) are used, which is in virtually all quantum experiments with spatial modes, the detector is a filter that can select only one mode at a time
Summary
Selecting the basis manifests as a choice of measurement, which brings us to the second key part of the toolkit: how to make a pattern sensitive detector to perform the measurement step with spatial modes of light We do have such a “pattern sensitive detector” in the form of a single mode fiber: it only allows a Gaussian to pass through and gives a “click” at the physical detector at the other end. When ‘A 1⁄4 À‘B, would the detectors result in coincidences
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