Welcome Mariana!

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We are delighted to welcome the newest addition to the BBQ Lab team: Mariana Annameng Ma!

Originally from China, Mariana obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Physics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. For her dissertation, she worked on the generation of correlated two-photon and four-photon states, characterising them through interferometric techniques. Now that she is joining us as a PhD student, we are excited to welcome her in the BBQ Lab to continue having fun with photonic entanglement.

Natalia wins top Uni Prize!

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We are thrilled to announce that our stellar postdoc, Dr. Natalia Herrera Valencia, has won Heriot-Watt University’s top research prize for her groundbreaking PhD dissertation on high-dimensional entanglement. This recognition is another jewel in her crown, a testament to Natalia’s contributions to the field of quantum information and communication.

Her remarkable journey is marked by an impressive collection of 10 published papers, including three highly cited first-author publications. These contributions have garnered over 500 citations to date, showcasing her exceptional impact at this early stage in her career.

Natalia’s thesis includes the demonstration of the unprecedented transport of quantum entanglement through a complex medium—a result that was featured on the cover of Nature Physics. It also caught the eye of the global media, including outlets such as BBC News. Congrats Natalia!

AVS Quantum Science: ℓ00ℓ entanglement

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We are happy to announce that our work has been published in AVS Quantum Science. In this special edition publication, we commemorate not only the important research of the late Jonathan P. Dowling, but also his notoriously wacky sense of humour. We demonstrate two-photon entanglement in the transverse spatial mode degree of freedom, particularly where one photon carries the fundamental Gaussian mode and the other a higher order Laguerre-Gaussian mode with index (ℓ) or radial (p). Taking inspiration from Dowling’s N00N states, we call these ℓ00ℓ-entangled states (we leave it up to your imagination as to what the radial (p) states may be called) .

Using the combination of a spatial light modulator (SLM) and a single mode fibre (SMF), we can make arbitrary coherent projective measurements on our generated ℓ00ℓ states. This allows us to demonstrate a “twisted” quantum eraser where Hong-Ou-Mandel interference is recovered between two distinguishable photons by projecting them into a rotated LG superposition basis. Furthermore, we verify entanglement by using an entanglement witness and reconstructing the density matrix.  We find that our generated ℓ00ℓ states have fidelities of 95.31% and 89.80% to their respective ideal maximally entangled states.

You can read the (open-access) publication here: https://pubs.aip.org/avs/aqs/article/5/4/045004/2920276/00-entanglement-and-the-twisted-quantum-eraser