Abstract

In a recent letter [L. Neves, G. Lima, J.G. Aguirre Gómez, C.H. Monken, C. Saavedra, S. Pádua, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005) 100501], we presented a scheme for generating pure entangled states of spatial qudits (D-dimensional quantum systems) by using the momentum transverse correlation of the parametric down-converted photons. In this work, we discuss a generalization of this process to enable the creation of mixed states. With the technique proposed we experimentally generated a mixture of two spatial qubits. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.