Free-space entangled quantum carpets

Abstract

The Talbot effect in quantum physics is known to produce intricate patterns in the probability distribution of a particle, known as ``quantum carpets,'' corresponding to the revival and replication of the initial wave function. Recently, it was shown that one can encode a $D$-level qudit in such a way that the Talbot effect can be used to process the $D$-dimensional quantum information [Far\'{\i}as et al., Phys. Rev. A 91, 062328 (2015)]. Here we introduce a scheme to produce free-propagating ``entangled quantum carpets'' with pairs of photons produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. First we introduce an optical device that can be used to synthesize arbitrary superposition states of Talbot qudits. Sending spatially entangled photon pairs through a pair of these devices produces an entangled pair of qudits. As an application, we show how the Talbot effect can be used to test a $D$-dimensional Bell inequality. Numerical simulations show that violation of the Bell inequality depends strongly on the amount of spatial correlation in the initial two-photon state. We briefly discuss how our optical scheme might be adapted to matter wave experiments.