- Letter
Verifying energy-time entanglement via nonlocal dispersion cancellation
Phys. Rev. A 111, L030403 – Published 25 March, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.111.L030403
Abstract
We study the direct experimental verification of continuous-variable (CV) energy-time entanglement, a crucial resource for long-distance quantum communication. Despite its potential advantages, including higher information capacity and robustness against noise, verifying energy-time CV entanglement under practical conditions has remained challenging. We find that nonlocal dispersion cancellation (NDC) provides an effective means to probe energy-time CV entanglement, successfully emulating photon propagation through a 379-km optical fiber at telecom wavelengths. By implementing NDC, we experimentally demonstrate that pairs of energy-time-entangled photons experience opposite dispersions, leaving the two-photon wave packet unbroadened, despite significant local dispersion acting individually on each photon. Our results show a violation of the separability criterion [Phys. Rev. A 82, 052120 (2010)] by 32 standard deviations, confirming energy-time CV entanglement independently of entanglement in other degrees of freedom. This work establishes a practical method for robustly verifying CV energy-time entanglement, facilitating advances in quantum information processing and secure long-distance quantum communication.