Quantum tomography of entangled spin-multi-photon states

Abstract: We present a novel method for quantum tomography of multi-qubit states. We apply the method to spin-multi-photon states, which we produce by periodic excitation of a semiconductor quantum-dot- confined spin every 1/4 of its coherent precession period. These timed excitations lead to the deterministic generation of strings of entangled photons in a cluster state. We show that our method can be used for characterizing the periodic process map, which produces the photonic cluster. From the measured process map, we quantify the robustness of the entanglement in the cluster. The 3-fold enhanced generation rate over previous demonstrations reduces the spin decoherence between the pulses and thereby increases the entanglement.