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Physical Review A

Spectral information and distinguishability in type-II down-conversion with a broadband pump

Warren P. Grice, Ian A. Walmsley

Published Aug 1, 1997• 514 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A model is presented to describe spontaneous type-II parametric down-conversion pumped by a broadband source. This process differs from the familiar cw-pumped down-conversion in that a broader range of pump energies is available for down-conversion. The properties of the nonlinear crystal determine how these energies are distributed into the down-converted photons. Because the two photons are polarized along different crystal axes, they have different spectral characteristics and are no longer exactly anticorrelated. As the pump bandwidth is increased, this effect becomes more pronounced. A fourth-order interference experiment is proposed, illustrating some of the features of broadband pumped down-conversion.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.56.1627

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Physical Review A•Apr 1, 1998•81 citations
A model is presented to describe spontaneous type-II parametric down-conversion pumped by a broadband source. This process differs from the familiar cw-pumped down-conversion in that a broader range of pump energies is available for down-conversion. The properties of the nonlinear crystal determine how these energies are distributed into the down-converted photons. Because the two photons are polarized along different crystal axes, they have different spectral characteristics and are no longer exactly anticorrelated. As the pump bandwidth is increased, this effect becomes more pronounced. A fourth-order interference experiment is proposed, illustrating some of the features of broadband pumped down-conversion.
The twin photons produced by a type‐II spontaneous parametric down conversion are well know as a potential source of photons for quantum teleportation due to the strong entanglement in polarization. This strong entanglement in polarization, however, depends on the spectral composition of the pump photon and the nature of optical isotropy of the crystal. By exact numerical calculation of the concurrence, we have shown that how pump photons spectral width and the birefringence nature of the crystal directly affect the degree of polarization entanglement of the twin photons.
Summary form only given. Pairs of entangled photons display a complex quantum state that cannot be represented through a product of single-particle states. The spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process, that takes place when a laser pulse pumps a second-order nonlinear crystal has become recently a convenient source of such nonclassical states of light in quantum optics experiments. Nonstationary effects are mainly observed when the pump pulse temporal duration is significantly shorter than the characteristic interaction time in the nonlinear crystal. We introduce a nonstationary theory of SPDC to describe the results of fourth-order quantum-interference experiments when no spectral filtering is applied to the down-converted fields. Experiments involving nonlinear SPDC crystals with three different lengths were performed. The ultraviolet laser pulses were obtained from a Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser with a second-harmonic generator. These pulses were used to pump nonlinear crystals to initiate the process of nonstationary spdc and generate orthogonally-polarized photon pairs. These pairs then went into a polarization interferometer, and the coincidence counts of the detectors at the two output ports of the interferometer were recorded.
Spectral properties of entangled photons generated via type-I frequency-nondegenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion are studied theoretically and experimentally. For monochromatic pumping, the joint spectral intensity function for the photon pair is found to be symmetric even though each photon has a different central wavelength. The single-photon (first-order) interference shows the familiar triangular interferogram, usually associated with the cw-pumped frequency-degenerate type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion. For broadband (ultrafast) pumping, on the other hand, the joint spectral intensity function is shown to be asymmetric, similar to the case of ultrafast-pumped frequency-degenerate type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The spectral studies reported here are expected to play an important role in developing ultrabright two-color entangled photon sources.
We report the spectral properties of broadband biphotons generated by pulsed type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion based on a periodically poled MgO-doped stoichiometric LiTaO3 (PPMgSLT). Spectroscopic and interferometric measurements were used to characterize the biphoton source. For the spectroscopic measurements, we used conventional spectroscopy and joint spectral intensity measurements. For the interferometric measurements, sum- and difference-frequency two-photon interference experiments were performed to estimate the spectral correlation and to ensure the broadband nature of biphotons, respectively. When using a picosecond Ti:sapphire as a pump source, the spectral width of biphotons was over 40 nm. Finally, we demonstrated the relationship between the two-photon interference visibility and the symmetricity of the joint spectral distribution.