Quantification of concurrence via weak measurement

Abstract

Since entanglement is not an observable per se, measuring its value in practice is a difficult task. Here we propose a protocol for quantifying a particular entanglement measure, namely, concurrence, of an arbitrary two-qubit pure state via a single fixed measurement setup by exploiting so-called weak measurements and the associated weak values together with the properties of the Laguerre-Gaussian modes. The virtue of our technique is that it is generally applicable for all two-qubit systems and does not involve simultaneous copies of the entangled state. We also propose an explicit optical implementation of the protocol.