Swapping Intra-photon entanglement to Inter-photon entanglement using linear optical devices

Abstract: We propose a curious protocol for swapping the intra-photon entanglement between path and polarization degrees of freedom of a single photon to inter-photon entanglement between two spatially separated photons which have never interacted. This is accomplished by using an experimental setup consisting of three suitable Mach-Zehnder interferometers along with number of beam splitters, polarization rotators and detectors. Using the same setup, we have also demonstrated an interesting quantum state transfer protocol, symmetric between Alice and Bob. Importantly, the Bell-basis discrimination is not required in both the swapping and state transfer protocols. Our proposal can be implemented using linear optical devices.