We demonstrate two approaches for unbalanced interferometers as time-bin qubit analyzers for quantum communication, robust against mode distortions and polarization effects as expected from free-space quantum communication systems including wavefront deformations, path fluctuations, pointing errors, and optical elements. Despite strong spatial and temporal distortions of the optical mode of a time-bin qubit, entangled with a separate polarization qubit, we verify entanglement using the Negative Partial Transpose, with the measured visibility of up to 0.85±0.01. The robustness of the analyzers is further demonstrated for various angles of incidence up to 0.2∘. The output of the interferometers is coupled into multimode fiber yielding a high system throughput of 0.74. Therefore, these analyzers are suitable and efficient for quantum communication over multimode optical channels.
@article{arxiv.1509.07490,
title = {Demonstration of analyzers for multimode photonic time-bin qubits},
author = {Jeongwan Jin and Sascha Agne and Jean-Philippe Bourgoin and Yanbao Zhang and Norbert Lütkenhaus and Thomas Jennewein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.07490},
year = {2018}
}