Diego Frustraglia

Nowadays, there is an intensive research activity on the production, manipulation, and detection of quantum entanglement in a variety of physical systems. Besides its fundamental interest, the activity is strongly motivated by the possibility of exploiting entanglement as a resource for quantum information processing. Special efforts are devoted to the study of entanglement in electronic systems, with a view to solid-state applications that could lead to a major technological breakthrough in the field of nanoelectronics. Here I discuss a proposal for the detection of entangled electron currents in nanoestructured mesoscopic conductors. The detection scheme is based on the measurement of current correlations at the exit ports of a beam splitter. I show that a proper processing of the data can be used to identify electronic entanglement in fairly general input states generated from an entangler device. This approach overcomes the restrictions present in previous proposals which demand entangler devices that guarantee the production of spatially separated electron pairs.