Experimental Unconditional Preparation and Detection of a Continuous Bound Entangled State of Light

Abstract

Among the possibly most intriguing aspects of quantum entanglement is that it comes in free and bound instances. The existence of bound entangled states certifies an intrinsic irreversibility of entanglement in nature and suggests a connection with thermodynamics. In this Letter, we present a first unconditional, continuous-variable preparation and detection of a bound entangled state of light. We use convex optimization to identify regimes rendering its bound character well certifiable, and continuously produce a distributed bound entangled state with an extraordinary and unprecedented significance of more than 10 standard deviations away from both separability and distillability. Our results show that the approach chosen allows for the efficient and precise preparation of multimode entangled states of light with various applications in quantum information, quantum state engineering, and high precision metrology.