title: Purification of single-photon entanglement.
abstract: Single-photon entanglement is a simple form of entanglement that exists between two spatial modes sharing a single photon. Despite its elementary form, it provides a resource as useful as polarization-entangled photons and it can be used for quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping operations. Here, we report the first experiment where single-photon entanglement is purified with a simple linear-optics based protocol. In addition to its conceptual interest, this result might find applications in long distance quantum communication based on quantum repeaters.
authors.affiliation: Group of Applied Physics, University of Geneva, 20, Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Salart
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Landry
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sangouard
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gisin
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Herrmann
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sanguinetti
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Sohler
authors.forename: R T
authors.initials: RT
authors.lastname: Thew
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zbinden