Quantum Secrets: Protecting Them in the Laboratory, Unraveling Them in the Classroom

As an AMO physicist at a small undergraduate college, I will share perspectives on teaching quantum physics and quantum information to classes of primarily non-physics majors (chiefly computer science and math majors). In addition, I report on recent undergraduate research in my quantum optics group, where our work focuses on non-ideal situations involving bipartite entangled states. In one project, we develop an adaptive protocol for efficiently using correlated local measurements to witness entanglement of qubit pairs in an unknown entangled state, and we demonstrate this protocol for polarization-entangled photon pairs. In another project, we develop a Bell basis for qudit pairs of even single-particle dimension d that generalizes the singlet/triplet symmetry properties of the qubit Bell states. Using this basis we establish the optimal number of qudit Bell states that can be reliably distinguished by a non-entangling measurement apparatus; such a limit is relevant to recent and near-term experimental realizations of quantum teleportation and dense coding protocols.