High-dimensional Path-Encoded Entanglement Distribution Between Photonic Chips Enabled by Multimode Phase Stabilisation

Abstract: The reliable distribution of high-dimensional entangled quantum states, an important resource in quantum technologies, through optical fibre networks is challenging due to the need to maintain coherence across multiple modes. Here we demonstrate the distribution of four-dimensional path-encoded entangled quantum states between photonic chips, enabled by a novel multimode phase stabilisation algorithm. The algorithm utilises the reconfigurability of the integrated photonic circuits to complete one iteration of phase stabilisation in just two measurement rounds for an arbitrary number of modes, and requires no additional hardware to the quantum measurements it enables. As a result, we are able to perform complete quantum state tomography across two chips using the minimum number of local projective measurements to verify the fidelity of the distributed entangled state to be $86\%$ (compared to $8.1\%$ without the phase stabilisation) with an entanglement entropy of $0.995\pm0.002$.