We report on a quantum optical experimental implementation of teleportation of unknown pure quantum states. This realizes all the nonlocal aspects of the original scheme proposed by Bennett et al. and is equivalent to it up to a local operation. We exhibit results for the teleportation of a linearly polarised state and of an elliptically polarised state. We show that the experimental results cannot be explained in terms of a classical channel alone.

The optical "spin-orbit" coupling occurring in a suitably patterned nonuniform birefringent plate known as a "q plate" allows entangling the polarization of a single photon with its orbital angular momentum (OAM). This process, in turn, can be exploited for building a bidirectional "spin-OAM interface," capable of transposing the quantum information from the spin to the OAM degree of freedom of photons and vice versa. Here, we experimentally demonstrate this process by single-photon quantum tomographic analysis. Moreover, we show that two-photon quantum correlations such as those resulting from coalescence interference can be successfully transferred into the OAM degree of freedom.

A macrostate consisting of N approximately 3.5x10{4} photons in a quantum superposition and entangled with a far apart single-photon state (microstate) is generated. Precisely, an entangled photon pair is created by a nonlinear optical process; then one photon of the pair is injected into an optical parametric amplifier operating for any input polarization state, i.e., into a phase-covariant cloning machine. Such transformation establishes a connection between the single photon and the multiparticle fields. We then demonstrate the nonseparability of the bipartite system by adopting a local filtering technique within a positive operator valued measurement.

We report the experimental realization of teleporting a one-particle entangled qubit. The qubit is physically implemented by a two-dimensional subspace of states of a mode of the electromagnetic field, specifically, the space spanned by the vacuum and the one-photon state. Our experiment follows the line suggested by Lee and Kim [Phys. Rev. A 63, 012305 (2000)] and Knill, Laflamme, and Milburn [Nature (London) 409, 46 (2001)]. An unprecedented large value of the teleportation "fidelity" has been attained: F = (95.3 +/- 0.6)%.

In classical computation, a 'bit' of information can be flipped (that is, changed in value from zero to one and vice versa) using a logical NOT gate; but the quantum analogue of this process is much more complicated. A quantum bit (qubit) can exist simultaneously in a superposition of two logical states with complex amplitudes, and it is impossible to find a universal transformation that would flip the original superposed state into a perpendicular state for all values of the amplitudes. But although perfect flipping of a qubit prepared in an arbitrary state (a universal NOT operation) is prohibited by the rules of quantum mechanics, there exists an optimal approximation to this procedure. Here we report the experimental realization of a universal quantum machine that performs the best possible approximation to the universal NOT transformation. The system adopted was an optical parametric amplifier of entangled photon states, which also enabled us to investigate universal quantum cloning.

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, associated with a helical structure of the wavefunction, has great potential in quantum photonics, as it allows a higher dimensional quantum space to be attached to each photon. Hitherto, however, the use of OAM has been hindered by difficulties in its manipulation. Here, by making use of the recently demonstrated spin-OAM information transfer tools, we report the first observation of the Hong–Ou–Mandel coalescence of two incoming photons having non-zero OAM into the same outgoing mode of a beamsplitter. The coalescence can be switched on and off by varying the input OAM state of the photons. Such an effect has then been used to carry out the 1 -> 2 universal optimal quantum cloning of OAM-encoded qubits, using the symmetrization technique already developed for polarization. These results are shown to be scalable to quantum spaces of arbitrary dimensions, even combining different degrees of freedom of the photons

We present an experimental method to engineer polarization-momentum hyperentangled two-photon states, using linear optics and a single type-I nonlinear crystal. These states have been completely characterized and their nonlocal behavior has been verified by an "all versus nothing" test of local realism, which represents a generalization of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) to the case of two entangled particles and two observers. The manipulation of these states may represent a useful control in quantum state engineering and Bell state measurements and, more in general, in quantum information applications

The new process of quantum injection into an optical parametric amplifier operating in entangled configuration is adopted to "amplify" into a large dimensionality spin-1 2 Hilbert space the quantum entanglement and superposition properties of the photon couples generated by parametric downconversion. The structure of the Wigner function and of the field's correlation functions shows a decoherence-free multiphoton Schroedinger-cat behavior of the emitted field which is largely detectable against the squeezed-vacuum noise. [S0031-9007 (98)07189-0] PACS numbers: 03.65.Bz, 03.67. -a, 42.50.Ar, 89.70. + c 2842 0031-9007͞98͞81(14)͞2842(4)$15.00