Fig. 3. Characterization of four-photon polarization-encoding quantum states.
a and b are fourfold coincidences as a function of the idler polarizer angles when the signal polarizer angles were kept at 0° (red) and 45° (black), respectively. The error bar was obtained from the square root of the experimental data. c and d give the real (Re) and imaginary (Im) parts of the ideal density matrix and the measured density matrix of the four-photon quantum states, respectively. The fidelity was 0.78 ± 0.02, which is completely satisfactory for further quantum information processing