Triggered qutrits for Quantum Communication protocols

Abstract

A general protocol in Quantum Information and Communication relies in the ability of producing, transmitting and reconstructing, in general, qunits. In this letter we show for the first time the experimental implementation of these three basic steps on a pure state in a three dimensional space, by means of the orbital angular momentum of the photons. The reconstruction of the qutrit is performed with tomographic techniques and a Maximum-Likelihood estimation method. In this way we also demonstrate that we can perform any transformation in the three dimensional space.