We report on the experimental observation and characterization of a six-photon entangled Dicke state. We obtain a fidelity as high as 0.654+/-0.024 and prove genuine six-photon entanglement by, amongst others, a two-setting witness yielding -0.422+/-0.148. This state has remarkable properties; e.g., it allows obtaining inequivalent entangled states of a lower qubit number via projective measure...

We introduce an experimental procedure for the detection of quantum entanglement of an unknown quantum state with a small number of measurements. The method requires neither a priori knowledge of the state nor a shared reference frame between the observers and can thus be regarded as a perfectly state-independent entanglement witness. The scheme starts with local measurements, possibly suppleme...

The first stage of the hybrid quantum repeaters is entanglement generation based on transmission of pulses in coherent states over a lossy channel. Protocols to make entanglement with only one type of error are favorable for rendering subsequent entanglement distillation efficient. Here we provide the tight upper bound on performances of these protocols that is determined only by the channel lo...

We quantify correlations (quantum and/or classical) between two continuous-variable modes as the maximal number of correlated bits extracted via local quadrature measurements. On Gaussian states, such "bit quadrature correlations" majorize entanglement, reducing to an entanglement monotone for pure states. For non-Gaussian states, such as photonic Bell states, photon-subtracted states, and mixt...

We put forward an approach to estimate the amount of bipartite spatial entanglement of down-converted photon states correlated in orbital angular momentum and the magnitude of the transverse radial wave vectors. Both degrees of freedom are properly considered in our framework, which only requires azimuthal local linear optical transformations and mode selection analysis with two fiber detectors...

We build, using group-theoretic methods, a general framework for approaching multi-particle entanglement. As far as entanglement is concerned, two states of n spin-1/2 particles are equivalent if they are on the same orbit of the group of local rotations (U(2)). We give a method for finding the number of parameters needed to describe inequivalent n spin-1/2 particles states. We also describe ho...

We study the high-dimensional orbital angular momentum OAM) entanglement contained in the spatial profiles of two quantum-correlated photons. For this purpose, we use a multi-mode two-photon interferometer with an image rotator in one of the interferometer arms. By measuring the two-photon visibility as a function of the image rotation angle we measure the azimuthal Schmidt number, i.e., we cou...

We propose a scheme for the observation of micro-macro entanglement in photon number based on amplifying and deamplifying a single-photon entangled state in combination with homodyne quantum state tomography. The created micro-macro entangled state, which exists between the amplification and deamplification steps, is a superposition of two components with mean photon numbers that differ by appr...

The linking number (topological entanglement) and the writhe (geometrical entanglement) of a model of circular double stranded DNA undergoing a thermal denaturation transition are investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. By allowing the linking number to fluctuate freely in equilibrium we see that the linking probability undergoes an abrupt variation (first-order) at the denaturation transition...

In this paper, we have investigated the dependence of the spectral entanglement and indistinguishability of photon pairs produced by the spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) procedure on the bandwidth of spectral filters used in the detection setup. The SPDC is a three-wave mixing process which occurs in a nonlinear crystal and generates entangled photon pairs and utilizes as one of th...