All-optical switching of photonic entanglement

Future quantum optical networks will require the ability to route entangled photons at high speeds, with minimal loss and added in-band noise, and-most importantly-without disturbing the photons' quantum state. Here we present an all-optical switch that fulfills these requirements and characterize its performance at the single-photon level. It exhibits a 200 ps switching window, 120 : 1 contrast, 1.5 dB loss, and induces no measurable degradation in the switched photons' entangled-state fidelity (<0.002). As a proof-of-principle demonstration of its capability, we use the switch to demultiplex a single quantum channel from a dual-channel, time-division-multiplexed entangled photon stream. Furthermore, because this type of switch couples the temporal and spatial degrees of freedom, it provides an important new tool with which to encode multiple-qubit quantum states on a single photon.