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Optics Communications

Purity and entanglement of two-photon polarization states generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion

Nadja K. Bernardes, Alexandre Gutenberg da Costa Moura, Carlos Henrique Monken

Published Feb 11, 2009• 3 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/j.optcom.2009.01.050

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Generation of entangled photons through spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) from micro- and nanoscale sources offers unprecedented freedom in quantum state engineering, including the ability to generate two-photon states with high-dimensional hyperentanglement. However, as the source of SPDC gets smaller, the role of photoluminescence increases, which leads to the contamination of two-photon states with a thermal background. Here we propose and implement a solution to this problem: by using pulsed SPDC and time distillation, we increase the purity and the heralding efficiency of the photon pairs. In the experiment, we increased the purity of the two-photon states generated in a 7 μm film of lithium niobate from 0.002 to 0.99. With the higher purity we were able to observe and characterize different polarization states of photon pairs generated simultaneously due to relaxed phase matching. In particular, we showed the presence of orthogonally polarized photons that are potentially usable for the generation of polarization entanglement.
Spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC)-based sources of photonic entangled states are usually generated using coherent pump fields. For temporal, spatial, and polarization degree of freedom, the down-converted light entanglement is limited by the coherence of the pump in the same degree of freedom. However, the effect of pump coherence on the entanglement in a different degree of freedom remains largely unexplored. Here we experimentally demonstrate the generation of polarization entanglement from SPDC pumped by a light emitting diode (LED), a spatiotemporally incoherent pump. The two-photon state is found to have a concurrence of 0.562 and purity of 0.647.
Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) is one of the most widely used sources of polarization-entangled photon pairs, and understanding the generated biphoton state is essential for realizing high-brightness and high-purity entangled-photon sources. In particular, Type-II SPDC produces a biphoton wavefunction with a complex coupling between the spatial and polarization degrees of freedom owing to birefringence. In this study, we calculate the real-space distribution of the two-photon polarization state from the biphoton wavefunction of Type-II SPDC generated in a \b{eta}-barium borate (BBO) crystal. By identifying the spatial correlation direction between polarization and real-space coordinates, we designed aperture shapes that restrict the collection along this correlation direction. Through both numerical simulations and experiments, we demonstrate that such correlation-aligned apertures simultaneously achieve higher entanglement purity and improved photon collection efficiency. These results establish a practical design principle for optimizing aperture geometries based on the real-space biphoton wavefunction, providing a new approach to realizing high-purity and high-brightness SPDC entangled-photon sources.