Violation of Bell inequality by four photon Greenberger Horne Zeilinger state with a phase from a warm atomic ensemble

Abstract

A Greenberger Horne Zeilinger (GHZ) entangled state with a phase is crucial for realizing desired multipartite quantum states for practical applications. Here, we report violations of the general Bell inequality (GBI) introduced in [1] using the four photon polarization entangled phase GHZ state realized via intrinsic polarization correlation and collective two-photon coherence in the 5S1/2 5P3/2 5D5/2 transition of 87Rb atoms. The phase GHZ state can be achieved by the unitary transformation of only one local phase of the four photons. Theoretically, the GHZ state with the {\pi}/4 phase affords maximal violation of the GBI of 2sqrt(2) at the local measurement settings of the Pauli operators {\sigma}_x and {\sigma}_y. We experimentally demonstrate strong violations of the GBI of the phase-GHZ state by 47 standard deviations. In addition to the entanglement witness for the phase GHZ state, the results represent a genuine four photon entanglement of the phase GHZ state, thereby providing a novel resource for realizing photonic quantum computation, magic state distillation from entangled states, and quantum networks based on atom photon interactions.