Transmitting more than 10 bit with a single photon

Opt Express. 2017 Feb 6;25(3):2826-2833. doi: 10.1364/OE.25.002826.

Abstract

Encoding information in the position of single photons has no known limits, given infinite resources. Using a heralded single-photon source and a spatial light modulator (SLM), we steer single photons to specific positions in a virtual grid on a large-area spatially resolving photon-counting detector (ICCD). We experimentally demonstrate selective addressing any location (symbol) in a 9072 size grid (alphabet) to achieve 10.5 bit of mutual information per detected photon between the sender and receiver. Our results can be useful for very-high-dimensional quantum information processing.