Experimental certification of sustained entanglement and nonlocality after sequential measurements

Abstract

Entanglement is a fundamental resource for quantum information science. However, bipartite entanglement is destroyed when one particle is observed via projective (sharp) measurements, as is typically the case in most experiments. Here, we show experimentally that, if instead of sharp measurements, one performs many sequential unsharp measurements on one particle that are suitably chosen depending on the previous outcomes, then entanglement is preserved and it is possible to reveal quantum correlations through measurements on the second particle at any step of the sequence. Specifically, we observe that pairs of photons entangled in polarization maintain their entanglement when one particle undergoes three sequential measurements and that each of these can be used to violate a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality. This proof-of-principle experiment demonstrates the possibility of repeatedly harnessing two crucial resources, entanglement and Bell nonlocality, that, in most quantum protocols, are destroyed after a single measurement. The protocol we use, which in principle works for an unbounded sequence of measurements, can be useful for randomness extraction.