Designing three-way entangled and nonlocal two-way entangled single particle states via alternate quantum walks

Abstract

Entanglement with single-particle states is advantageous in quantum technology because of their ability to encode and process information more securely than their multi-particle analogs. Threeway and nonlocal two-way entangled single-particle states are desirable in this context. Herein, we generate genuine three-way entanglement from an initially separable state involving three degrees of freedom of a quantum particle, which evolves via a 2D alternate quantum walk employing a resource-saving single-qubit coin. We achieve maximum possible values for the three-way entanglement quantified by the π-tangle between the three degrees of freedom. We also generate optimal nonlocal two-way entanglement, quantified by the negativity between the nonlocal position degrees of freedom of the particle. This prepared architecture using quantum walks can be experimentally realized with a photon.