Abstract
Entangled quantum particles have correlations stronger than those allowed by classical physics. These correlations are at the heart of deep foundational questions in quantum mechanics1,2,3, and form the basis of many emerging quantum technologies4,5,6,7,8,9. Although the discrete variables of up to 14 ions10 and the continuous variables between three intense optical beams11,12 have been entangled, it has remained an open challenge to entangle the continuous properties of three or more individual particles. Here we experimentally demonstrate genuine tripartite continuous-variable entanglement between three separated particles. In our set-up the three particles are photons created directly from a single input photon; the creation process leads to quantum correlations between the energies and emission times of the photons. The entanglement between our photons is the three-party generalization of the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen1 correlations for continuous variables, and could serve as a valuable resource in a wide variety of quantum information tasks.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation ERA, QuantumWorks, NSERC, OCE, Industry Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and CFI for financial support. C.S. acknowledges support by an Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF) New Faculty Award. We thank B. Boulanger and A. M. Steinberg for useful discussions.
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L.K.S. and D.R.H. carried out the experiment. C.S., K.J.R. and T.J. conceived the experiment. Z.Y. developed the detectors and electronics used in the experiment. Data was analysed by L.K.S., D.R.H., K.J.R., and T.J. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.
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Shalm, L., Hamel, D., Yan, Z. et al. Three-photon energy–time entanglement. Nature Phys 9, 19–22 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2492
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2492
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