Measuring dimensionality and purity of high-dimensional entangled states.

Abstract

High-dimensional entangled states are promising candidates for increasing the security and encoding capacity of quantum systems. While it is possible to witness and set bounds for the entanglement, precisely quantifying the dimensionality and purity in a fast and accurate manner remains an open challenge. Here, we report an approach that simultaneously returns the dimensionality and purity of high-dimensional entangled states by simple projective measurements. We show that the outcome of a conditional measurement returns a visibility that scales monotonically with state dimensionality and purity, allowing for quantitative measurements for general photonic quantum systems. We illustrate our method using two separate bases, the orbital angular momentum and pixels bases, and quantify the state dimensionality by a variety of definitions over a wide range of noise levels, highlighting its usefulness in practical situations. Importantly, the number of measurements needed in our approach scale linearly with dimensions, reducing data acquisition time significantly. Our technique provides a simple, fast and direct measurement approach.