Experimental Realization of Robust Self-Testing of Bell State Measurements

Bell state measurements, of which the eigenvectors are in an entangled form, are crucial resources in the construction of quantum networks. Therefore, device-independent certification of a Bell state measurement has significance in the quantum information process because it satisfies the exact demand on security. In this study, we implement a proof-of-concept experiment to certify a Bell state measurement device independently in an entanglement swapping process, namely, self-testing. Instead of preparing a tensor product of two singlets with four photons, multiplex encoding in polarization and spatial modes is utilized to produce two pairs of entangled qubits. As a result, we implement a full Bell state measurement and achieve a high degree of Bell violation on the remaining two qubits, which are required for nontrivial self-testing of a Bell state measurement. Furthermore, our results combine the correlations before and after the swapping; thus, the quality of the performed Bell state measurement can be precisely inferred.