Manipulating the direction of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering exhibits an inherent asymmetric feature that differs from both entanglement and Bell nonlocality, which leads to one-way EPR steering. Although this one-way EPR steering phenomenon has been experimentally observed, the schemes to manipulate the direction of EPR steering have not been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate three schemes to manipulate the direction of EPR steering, either by varying the noise on one party of a two-mode squeezed state (TMSS) or transmitting the TMSS in a noisy channel. The dependence of the direction of EPR steering on the noise and transmission efficiency in the quantum channel is analyzed. The experimental results show that the direction of EPR steering of the TMSS can be changed in the presented schemes. Our work is helpful in understanding the fundamental asymmetry of quantum nonlocality and has potential applications in future asymmetric quantum information processing.