Hyperentanglement of photons emitted by a quantum dot

Summary form only given. Entanglement, a fundamental resource of quantum technologies, is a unique quantum mechanical attribute. In various systems it can be achieved in various individual degrees of freedom, however some of those systems are able to create entanglement in multiple degrees of freedom simultaneously: hyper-entanglement [1]. Here, we report on demonstration of polarization [2] and time-bin [3] hyper-entangled photons emitted from a single quantum dot. By applying two-photon resonant and coherent excitation on a quantum dot system with marginal fine structure splitting we yield fidelities to the maximally entangled state of 0.80(3) and 0.87(4) in polarization and time-bin, respectively. Quantum enhanced communication schemes rely on Bell-state measurements, which find their simplest realization in the interference of two photons at a beam splitter. However, this method is efficiency limited [4] and a complete Bell state analysis of a photon pair entangled in one degree of freedom using only linear optics is impossible. This limitation can be overcome if the photon pair is entangled in more than one degree of freedom, a hyper-entangled state. Using such states in such schemes does not only reduce the resource overhead [5] it also offers the possibility to increase the success rate significantly [6].