Robert Fickler, Radek Lapkiewicz, William N. Plick, Mario Krenn, Christoph Schaeff, Sven Ramelow, Anton Zeilinger
Single photons with helical phase structure may carry a quantized amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and are of great interest in quantum information science and fundamental tests of quantum theory. Since there is no theoretical upper limit on how many quanta of OAM a single photon can carry, those systems offer the possibility to create superpositions for one particle and entanglement between two particles with an arbitrary high difference in the quantum number. By transferring polarization entanglement to the OAM degree-of-freedom with an interferometric scheme, we created and observed entanglement up to $600\bar{h}$ difference in the orbital angular momentum. To our knowledge, we have thus demonstrated entanglement of the highest quantum number in any experiment so far. The only restrictive factor towards even higher numbers arises due to current technical limitations. Furthermore, we show experimentally that the entanglement of very high OAM can be used to improve applications, like the sensitivity of the angular resolution in remote sensing.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.2376
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