Full characterization of a three-photon GHZ state using quantum state tomography

Kevin J. Resch, Philip Walther, Anton Zeilinger

Published 2004-12-20Version 1

We have performed the first experimental tomographic reconstruction of a three-photon polarization state. Quantum state tomography is a powerful tool for fully describing the density matrix of a quantum system. We measured 64 three-photon polarization correlations and used a "maximum-likelihood" reconstruction method to reconstruct the GHZ state. The entanglement class has been characterized using an entanglement witness operator and the maximum predicted values for the Mermin inequality was extracted.