Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $Ξ$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $Ξ$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $Ξ$ after the beam splitter mixing with $Ξ$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.