This work deals with creation, manipulation and detection of quantum photon states, in one and two degrees of freedom, encoded in polarization and time-bin basis. A particular quantum state, an entangled state, carries a wide range of implementations, that are impossible via classical tasks, such as teleportation, dense coding, and quantum communication protocols. One of these tasks, quantum cryptography, allows intrinsically secure transmission of information. Nowadays, quantum key distribution is implemented in intercity quantum networks, by using telecommunication fibers to connect nodes within the network. In future scenarios, photons could travel through greater distances, but, due to losses, fiber links need for quantum repeater, a very demanding engineering solution. An alternative way, is the use of free-space satellite quantum networks.
Here we focus on polarization and time bin degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the photons as a resource for quantum information. In particular we study the possibility to share an hyper-entangled state in polarization and time-bin DOFs between two spatially separated users. In addition we study a new tomographic method, based on compressed sensing, to recover the density matrix of a quantum state when prior information are available.
Typical implementation of time-bin photon source, based on Franson’s scheme, suffers on intrinsic loophole. To overcome that we experimentally demonstrated that with a time-bin source it is possible to obtain a very high visibility in order to violate a chained Bell inequality.
Interference at single photon level through satellite-ground channels is presented here, showing that, temporal encoding is preserved along turbulent channels. With this experiment we show that temporal encoding can be use for a future implementation of satellite quantum communication. Finally, to complete this work, we demonstrate a new method to certified the randomness of a source, useful in many task, such as quantum cryptography by using a polarization entangled photons source.