How a single photon can mediate entanglement between two others

We describe a novel quantum information protocol, which probabilistically entangles two distant photons that have never interacted. Different from the entanglement swapping protocol, which requires two pairs of maximally entangled photons as the input states, as well as a Bell-state measurement (BSM), the present scheme only requires three photons: two to be entangled and another to mediate the correlation, and no BSM, in a process that we call “entanglement mediation”. Furthermore, in analyzing the paths of the photons in our arrangement, we conclude that one of them, the mediator, exchanges information with the two others simultaneously, which seems to be a new quantum-mechanical feature.