Resilience of orbital angular momentum qubits and effects on hybrid entanglement

Abstract

The orbital angular momentum of light (OAM) provides a promising approach for the implementation of multidimensional states (qudits) for quantum information purposes. In order to characterize the degradation undergone by the information content of qubits encoded in a bidimensional subspace of the orbital angular momentum degree of freedom of photons, we study how the state fidelity is affected by a transverse obstruction placed along the propagation direction of the light beam. Emphasis is placed on the effects of planar and radial hard-edged aperture functions on the state fidelity of Laguerre-Gaussian transverse modes and the entanglement properties of polarization-OAM hybrid-entangled photon pairs.