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Physical Review A

Transverse spatial entanglement in parametric down-conversion

Stephen Patrick Walborn, Carlos Henrique Monken

Published Dec 12, 2007• 38 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is known that the entanglement present in the transverse spatial properties of photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion depends explicitly on the characteristics of the pump laser beam. Here we show that, for pump beams described by a Hermite-Gaussian mode, the entanglement depends on the beam width as well as the order of the beam. The amount of entanglement generally increases with the order of the beam and is less dependent on the beam width for higher orders. We propose a method to measure the spatial entanglement directly, independent of the dimension of the subsystems.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.062305

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It is known that the entanglement present in the transverse spatial properties of photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion depends explicitly on the characteristics of the pump laser beam. Here we show that, for pump beams described by a Hermite-Gaussian mode, the entanglement depends on the beam width as well as the order of the beam. The amount of entanglement generally increases with the order of the beam and is less dependent on the beam width for higher orders. We propose a method to measure the spatial entanglement directly, independent of the dimension of the subsystems.
We provide a general decomposition of the two-photon state produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion in Hermite-Gaussian modes, in the case that the pump beam is described by a Hermite-Gaussian beam of any order. We show that the spatial correlations depend explicitly on the order of the pump beam, as well as other experimental parameters. We use the decomposition to demonstrate a few interesting cases. Our results are applicable to the engineering of two-photon spatial entanglement, in particular for non-Gaussian states.
We examine experimentally how the degree of position-momentum entanglement of photon pairs depends on the transverse coherence of the pump beam that excites them in a process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Using spatially incoherent light from a light-emitting diode, we obtain strong position correlation of the photons, but we find that transverse momentum correlation, and thus entanglement, is entirely absent. When we continuously vary the degree of spatial coherence on the pump beam, we observe the emergence of stronger momentum correlations and entanglement. We present theoretical arguments that explain our experimental results. Our results shed light on entanglement generation and can be applied to control entanglement for quantum information applications.
We show that the transfer of the angular spectrum of the pump beam to the two-photon state in spontaneous parametric down-conversion enables the generation of entangled Hermite-Gaussian modes. We derive an analytical expression for the two-photon state in terms of these modes and show that there are restrictions on both the parity and order of the down-converted Hermite-Gaussian fields. Using these results, we show that the two-photon state is indeed entangled in Hermite-Gaussian modes. We propose experimental methods of creating maximally-entangled Bell states and nonmaximally entangled pure states of first order Hermite-Gaussian modes.
High-dimensional spatial entanglement generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) provides a powerful resource for quantum information processing, yet its mode structure becomes increasingly complex when the pump occupies a higher-order Laguerre--Gaussian (LG) mode. Here, we develop an algebraic framework for characterizing biphoton spatial-mode entanglement by factorizing LG-pumped SPDC into a spatial-mode beam-splitter transformation followed by spatial two-mode squeezing. By choosing the biphoton LG basis radius as the geometric mean of the pump-beam radius and the crystal-induced correlation width, we obtain a natural modal basis in which the two operations can be treated separately. When the pump-beam radius matches the correlation width, spatial squeezing vanishes, and the two circular-mode components of the pump are independently conserved across the signal and idler photons, leading to conservation of both orbital angular momentum and the total spatial mode number. We further derive an analytical expression for the Schmidt number for arbitrary LG pump modes and squeezing strengths, revealing how the radial and azimuthal pump indices govern the dimensionality of the spatial entanglement. This algebraic characterization provides a unified description of the mode structure, conservation laws, and entanglement dimensionality of higher-order-LG-pumped SPDC.
We demonstrate experimental generation of spatially entangled photon pairs by spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) using a partial spatially coherent pump beam. By varying the spatial coherence of the pump, we show its influence on the down-converted photon's spatial correlations and on its degree of entanglement, in excellent agreement with theory. We then exploit this property to produce pairs of photons with a specific degree of entanglement by tailoring of the pump coherence length. This work thus unravels the fundamental transfer of coherence occurring in SPDC processes, and provides a simple experimental scheme to generate photon pairs with a well-defined degree of spatial entanglement, which may be useful for quantum communication and information processing.
Ghost interference with entangled photon pairs are studied theoretically. The pump beam in parametric down-conversion is treated as the Gaussian profile, while for the function describing phase matching in the longitudinal direction, both a Gaussian and a sinc function are considered. The numerical results show that the transverse size of the pump beam and transverse coherence width of the parametric fluorescence strongly influence the interference pattern. With the increase of the pump transverse size and the decrease of transverse coherence width, the interference pattern becomes more and more prominent. When the transverse coherence width is small to 0.01 mm category, the Gaussian and sinc models give the same results.