Transfer of entanglement from electrons to photons by optical selection rules

The entanglement transfer from electrons localized in a pair of quantum dots to circularly polarized photons is governed by optical selection rules, enforced by conservation of angular momentum. We point out that the transfer cannot be achieved by means of unitary evolution unless the angular momentum of the two initial qubit states differs by 2 units of ℎ. In particular, for spin-entangled electrons, the difference in angular momentum is 1 unit-so the transfer fails. Nevertheless, the transfer can be successfully completed if the unitary evolution is followed by a measurement of the angular momentum of each quantum dot and post-processing of the photons using the measured values as input