Transverse entanglement migration in Hilbert space

Abstract

We show that, although the amount of mutual entanglement of photons propagating in free space is fixed, the type of correlations between the photons that determine the entanglement can dramatically change during propagation. We show that this amounts to a migration of entanglement in Hilbert space, rather than real space. For the case of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, the migration of entanglement in transverse coordinates takes place from modulus to phase of the biphoton state and back again. We propose an experiment to observe this migration in Hilbert space and to determine the full entanglement.