Quantum walks and wavepacket dynamics on a lattice with twisted photons

Abstract: The "quantum walk" has emerged recently as a paradigmatic process for the dynamic simulation of complex quantum systems, entanglement production and quantum computation. Hitherto, photonic implementations of quantum walks have mainly been based on multi-path interferometric schemes in real space. Here, we report the experimental realization of a discrete quantum walk taking place in the orbital angular momentum space of light, both for a single photon and for two simultaneous photons. In contrast to previous implementations, the whole process develops in a single light beam, with no need of interferometers; it requires optical resources scaling linearly with the number of steps; and it allows flexible control of input and output superposition states. Exploiting the latter property, we explored the system band structure in momentum space and the associated spin-orbit topological features by simulating the quantum dynamics of Gaussian wavepackets. Our demonstration introduces a novel versatile photonic platform for quantum simulations.