Hybrid Path-Transverse Electric Mode Qudit Encoding on an Integrated Photonic Chip

Hybrid encodings, where multiple degrees of freedom are used to encode quantum information, can increase the size of the Hilbert space with minimal increase to hardware requirements. We show a reprogrammable integrated photonic device, with multimodal components designed to allow for control over the transverse electric modes. We use this device to generate qudit states entangled in the path and transverse electric mode degrees of freedom. We generate and verify a hyperentangled state with a fidelity of FHE = 67.3 ± 0.2% and a GHZ₄-style state with a fidelity of F_GHZ₄ = 85.2 ± 0.4 %. We use our hyperentangled state in a single-copy entanglement distillation protocol, resulting in an average $9.1 %$ increase in the fidelity of the distilled Bell state for up to a $50%$ probability of bit flip error. By utilising degrees of freedom which are readily compatible with integrated photonics, our work highlights how this hybrid encoding demonstrates a first step in using the transverse electric mode to reduce the footprint of integrated quantum photonic experiments.