Sparsity-Driven Entanglement Detection in High-Dimensional Quantum States

The characterization of high-dimensional quantum entanglement is crucial for advanced quantum computing and quantum information algorithms. Traditional methods require extensive data acquisition and suffer from limited visibility due to experimental noise. Here, we introduce a sparsity-driven framework to enhance the detection and certification of high-dimensional entanglement in spatially entangled photon pairs. By applying ell₁-regularized reconstruction to sample covariance matrices obtained from measurements on photons produced via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) measurements, we enhance the visibility of the correlation signal while suppressing noise. We demonstrate, using a position-momentum Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entanglement criterion, that this approach enables certification of an entanglement dimensionality that cannot be achieved without regularization. Our method is scalable, simple to use and compatible with existing quantum-optics platforms, thus paves the way for efficient, real-time analysis of high-dimensional quantum states.