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Physical Review A

Spatial entanglement and optimal single-mode coupling

Warren P. Grice, Ryan S. Bennink, D. S. Goodman, Andrew T. Ryan

Published Feb 15, 2011• 39 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The challenge of optimizing the emission into single spatial modes of photons from spontaneous parametric down-conversion is addressed from the perspective of spatial entanglement. It is shown that single-mode coupling is most efficient in the absence of entanglement. Evidence of the relationship between spatial entanglement and pump focusing is revealed through experimental results, and numerical simulations show that spatial entanglement and single-mode coupling are optimized under nearly identical pump parameters.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.83.023810

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The challenge of optimizing the emission into single spatial modes of photons from spontaneous parametric down-conversion is addressed from the perspective of spatial entanglement. It is shown that single-mode coupling is most efficient in the absence of entanglement. Evidence of the relationship between spatial entanglement and pump focusing is revealed through experimental results, and numerical simulations show that spatial entanglement and single-mode coupling are optimized under nearly identical pump parameters.
Photons produced in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are typically entangled in multiple degrees of freedom. Although polarization is often the parameter of interest, the presence of spectral or spatial entanglement can complicate experiments, either by reducing the visibility of certain interference effects or by reducing collection efficiency. Several recent works have shown that the collection efficiency can be improved by focusing the pump beam. This approach has the added benefit of increasing the bandwidths of the emitted photons. We show that, in the case of type II SPDC, a focused pump can result in different spatial profiles for the signal and idler. If the crystal is configured for emission of polarization-entangled photon pairs, this effect will reduce the fidelity of that entanglement. Moreover, this spatial asymmetry leads to different spectral profiles for the two photons, even when the pump is monochromatic. The spectral and spatial asymmetries can be attributed to the difference in the angular dispersion (walk-off) of the two polarizations, along with a strong correlation between wavelength and emission direction. We also examine the link between spatial entanglement and single-mode coupling efficiency. We find that efficiency is maximized when spatial entanglement can be eliminated. For the case in which walk-off does not play a role, this can be accomplished by properly focusing the pump.
Both correlated-mode coupling efficiency and photon pair flux (brightness) of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) coupled into single-mode fibers are key parameters for various quantum information science applications. We present an experimental investigation on the optimization of the correlated-mode coupling efficiency and the brightness of frequency-degenerated SPDC photon pairs into single-mode optical fibers. Using photon pairs generated from a type-I phase-matched bulk $\ensuremath{\beta}$-barium borate crystal pumped by a continuous-wave laser, we carefully evaluated both the correlated-mode coupling efficiency and the brightness of SPDC light coupled to a single-mode optical fiber, while continuously changing the focusing of the pump and collection modes, experimenting with Rayleigh lengths from 3 to 280 (for the pump) and 0.2 to 20 (for the collection) times the crystal length. The measured data suggest that the correlated-mode coupling efficiency can be close to unity for any pump focus, however, the optimal Rayleigh length of the collection mode depends on the pump focus parameter, and the brightness can be increased by tightening the pump focus, provided that the Rayleigh length of the collection mode is precisely adjusted. A maximal correlated-mode coupling efficiency of $99.0\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1.3%$ was experimentally achieved. These results will be useful for photonic quantum science and technology using SPDC sources with high heralding efficiencies.
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.