Publications by authors named "Sebastian Ecker"

The phenomenon of entanglement marks one of the furthest departures from classical physics and is indispensable for quantum information processing. Despite its fundamental importance, the distribution of entanglement over long distances through photons is unfortunately hindered by unavoidable decoherence effects. Entanglement distillation is a means of restoring the quality of such diluted entanglement by concentrating it into a pair of qubits.

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Sources of entanglement are an enabling resource in quantum technology, and pushing the limits of generation rate and quality of entanglement is a necessary prerequisite towards practical applications. Here, we present an ultrabright source of polarization-entangled photon pairs based on time-reversed Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. By superimposing four pair-creation possibilities on a polarization beam splitter, pairs of identical photons are separated into two spatial modes without the usual requirement for wavelength distinguishability or noncollinear emission angles.

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In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell's inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of ≲7.

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Quantum entanglement is a fundamental resource in quantum information processing and its distribution between distant parties is a key challenge in quantum communications. Increasing the dimensionality of entanglement has been shown to improve robustness and channel capacities in secure quantum communications. Here we report on the distribution of genuine high-dimensional entanglement via a 1.

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