title: Resilience of hybrid optical angular momentum qubits to turbulence.
abstract: Recent schemes to encode quantum information into the total angular momentum of light, defining rotation-invariant hybrid qubits composed of the polarization and orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom, present interesting applications for quantum information technology. However, there remains the question as to how detrimental effects such as random spatial perturbations affect these encodings. Here, we demonstrate that alignment-free quantum communication through a turbulent channel based on hybrid qubits can be achieved with unit transmission fidelity. In our experiment, alignment-free qubits are produced with q-plates and sent through a homemade turbulence chamber. The decoding procedure, also realized with q-plates, relies on both degrees of freedom and renders an intrinsic error-filtering mechanism that maps errors into losses.
authors: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Caixa Postal 68528, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21941-972, Brazil.
authors: Osvaldo Jiménez
authors: OJ
authors: Farías
authors: Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors: Vincenzo
authors: V
authors: D'Ambrosio
authors: Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors: Caterina
authors: C
authors: Taballione
authors: Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy.
authors: Fabrizio
authors: F
authors: Bisesto
authors: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Napoli Federico II, Compl. Univ. di Monte S. Angelo, 80126 Napoli, Italy.
authors: Sergei
authors: S
authors: Slussarenko
authors: Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors: Leandro
authors: L
authors: Aolita
authors: 1] Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Napoli Federico II, Compl. Univ. di Monte S. Angelo, 80126 Napoli, Italy [2] CNR-SPIN, Complesso Universitario di Monte S. Angelo, 80126 Napoli, Italy.
authors: Lorenzo
authors: L
authors: Marrucci
authors: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Caixa Postal 68528, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21941-972, Brazil.
authors: Stephen P
authors: SP
authors: Walborn
authors: 1] Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy [2] Istituto Nazionale di Ottica (INO-CNR), Largo E. Fermi 6, I-50125 Firenze, Italy.
authors: Fabio
authors: F
authors: Sciarrino