Quantum entanglement of angular momentum states with quantum numbers up to 10010

Understand

Photons with a twisted phase front carry a quantized amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and have become important in various fields of optics, such as quantum and classical information science or optical tweezers.

• Because no upper limit on the OAM content per photon is known, they are also interesting systems to experimentally challenge quantum mechanical prediction for high quantum numbers.
• Here, we take advantage of a recently developed technique to imprint unprecedented high values of OAM, namely spiral phase mirrors (SPM), to generate photons with more than 10,000 quanta of OAM.
• Moreover, we demonstrate quantum entanglement between these large OAM quanta of one photon and the polarization of its partner photon.