Single-photon steering

Abstract

According to Schrödinger, the laws of quantum mechanics obliges us to admit that by suitable measurement taken on one of the two system only 1 the state of the other system can not only be determined but steered too. That is, it conveys the potential ability to steer the state of another physical system without interacting with it by implementing independent measurements, this nonlocal phenomenon was named steering. On the other hand, the first proposals about the nonlocality of a single photon focus on showing the Bell nonlocality by using a single photon path entanglement. This path entanglement of a single photon was also used for analyzing and experimentally produce the steering of a single photon. However, these established facts have been recently called into question suggesting that single-photon entanglement is not non-local. In this letter, we show that by incorporating and manipulating the internal degrees of freedom of the photon, together with the external path, it is easy to demonstrate the nonlocal effect of steering of a single photon's state. In this sense, the experimental set-up that we propose differs from the one reported in the quantum optics literature which only uses, to the best of our knowledge, the path entanglement of photons for showing the steering phenomenon, i.e. here we exploit the entanglement between the internal and external degrees of freedom of the photon to show this nonlocal effect. The introduction of the photon's internal degrees of freedom in the experimental set-up gives us new insight, advantages and possibilities to control the nonlocal character of the single-photon entangled state.