Quantifying two-mode entanglement of bosonic Gaussian states from their full counting statistics

Abstract

We study the entanglement properties of two-mode bosonic Gaussian states based on their multi-mode counting statistics. We exploit the idea that measuring high-order correlations of particle numbers can reveal entanglement without making any assumptions about the coherence of the fields. We show that the two- and four-body number correlations are sufficient to fully characterize the entanglement of two-mode bosonic Gaussian states for which each mode exhibits a thermal distribution. In addition, we derive an entanglement witness based on two-body correlations alone. Our findings are of great importance because it becomes possible to reveal entanglement in a series of recent experiments.