Environment-induced entanglement with a single photon

Abstract

We propose an all-optical setup, which couples different degrees of freedom of a single photon, to investigate entanglement generation by a common environment. The two qubits are represented by the photon polarization and Hermite-Gauss transverse modes, while the environment corresponds to the photon path. For an initially two-qubit separable state, the increase of entanglement is analyzed as the probability of an environment-induced transition ranges from 0 to 1. An entanglement witness that is invariant throughout the evolution of the system yields a direct measurement of the concurrence of the two-qubit state.