We verified interferometrically generation of spatially pure photon pairs via spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a multimode nonlinear waveguide in the 800 nm spectral region, obtaining two-photon interference visibility robustly exceeding 90% without any spatial filtering.
We report measurements of two-photon interference using a cw-pumped type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion source based on a multimode perodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (PPKTP) waveguide. We have used the recently demonstrated technique of controlling the spatial characteristics of the down-conversion process via intermodal dispersion to generate photon pairs in fundamental transverse modes, thus ensuring their spatial indistinguishability. Good overlap of photon modes within the pairs has been verified using the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer and the preparation of polarization entanglement in the Shih-Alley configuration, yielding visibilities consistently above 90%.
We present experimental realization of type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (KTiOPO4) nonlinear waveguide. We demonstrate that by careful exploitation of intermodal dispersion in the waveguide it is feasible to produce photon pairs in well defined transverse modes without any additional spatial filtering at the output. Spatial characteristics is verified by measurements of the M2 beam quality factors. We also prepared a postselected polarization-entangled two-photon state shown to violate Bell’s inequality. Similar techniques based on intermodal dispersion can be used to generate spatial entanglement and hyperentanglement.
Two spatially separated type-I nonlinear crystals are pumped by femtosecond laser pulses to create entangled photon pairs in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The two-photon entangled state exhibits high-visibility quantum interference for both polarization and space-time variables without the need of stringent spectral postselection by using narrow-band filters. The visibility is insensitive to the thickness of the crystals, unlike in the case of pulse pumped type-II parametric down-conversion; therefore the intensity can be easily increased by using thick nonlinear crystals. This method will be indispensable in experiments that require a pulsed source of entangled photon pairs, such as generation of multiphoton entangled states, quantum teleportation, and quantum communications.
We analyze theoretically spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a multimode nonlinear waveguide as a source of entangled pairs of spatial qubits, realized as superpositions of a photon in two orthogonal transverse modes of the waveguide. It is shown that, by exploiting intermodal dispersion, down-conversion into the relevant pairs of spatial modes can be selected by spectral filtering, which also provides means to fine tune the properties of the generated entangled state. We also discuss an inverting interferometer detecting the spatial parity of the input beam as a versatile tool to characterize properties of the generated state. A single-photon Wigner function obtained by a scan of the displaced parity can be used to identify the basis modes of a spatial qubit, whereas correlations between displaced parity measurements on two photons can directly verify quantum entanglement through a violation of Bell's inequalities.