Using intense amplified short pulses, stimulated parametric down-conversion has been studied. We generated and characterized two polarization entangled spatial modes containing up to 50 indistinguishable photon pairs.
We consider the creation of polarization entangled light from parametric down-conversion driven by an intense pulsed pump field inside a cavity. The multiphoton states produced are close approximations to singlet states of two very large spins. A criterion is derived to quantify the entanglement of such states. We study the dynamics of the system in the presence of losses and other imperfections, concluding that the creation of strongly entangled states with photon numbers up to a million seems achievable.
A growing number of experiments make use of multiple pairs of photons generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We show that entanglement in unwanted degrees of freedom can adversely affect the results of these experiments. We also discuss techniques to reduce or eliminate spectral and spatial entanglement, and we present results from two-photon polarization-entangled source with almost no entanglement in these degrees of freedom. Finally, we present two methods for the generation of four-photon polarization-entangled states. In one of these methods, four-photon can be generated without the need for intermediate two-photon entanglement.
Using stimulated emission, a photon pair source can be characterized by seeding the signal mode with a bright classical beam and measuring the stimulated idler field, thus replacing two-photon coincidence counting with classical intensity detection. We apply this approach to the continuous transverse spatial degrees of freedom of a down conversion source and show that it is possible to certify spatial entanglement with only intensity measurements. We demonstrate this capability through variance-based entanglement and steering witnesses, as well as the Fedorov ratio. This method is useful for studying entanglement properties of photon pair sources in conditions where alignment and photon counting measurements are difficult and time-consuming.