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Physica Scripta

Transverse amplitude transfer experiments based on the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion

Roberto Ramírez-Alarcón, Verónica Vicuña-Hernández, Héctor Cruz-Ramírez, Alfred B. U’Ren

Published May 13, 2015• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this work we study, for the spontaneous parametric downconversion process, how the transverse amplitude of the pump may be transferred to one of the emitted photons in a given pair when heralded by the detection of the remaining photon. We present a theoretical description of this process along with a discussion of the short-crystal regime within which faithful transfer of the transverse amplitude occurs. We show experimental results for Gaussian and Bessel–Gauss pump beams. In both cases, we verify that the transverse amplitude mechanism occurs and for the former also shows the effects of a departure from the short crystal regime. For the latter we show that our heralded single photons exhibit a non-diffractive behavior, and for orders l = 1 and l = 2 we show that these heralded single photons are in fact vortices with orbital angular momentum transferred from the pump.

DOI
10.1088/0031-8949/90/6/068013

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In this work we study, for the spontaneous parametric downconversion process, how the transverse amplitude of the pump may be transferred to one of the emitted photons in a given pair when heralded by the detection of the remaining photon. We present a theoretical description of this process along with a discussion of the short-crystal regime within which faithful transfer of the transverse amplitude occurs. We show experimental results for Gaussian and Bessel–Gauss pump beams. In both cases, we verify that the transverse amplitude mechanism occurs and for the former also shows the effects of a departure from the short crystal regime. For the latter we show that our heralded single photons exhibit a non-diffractive behavior, and for orders l = 1 and l = 2 we show that these heralded single photons are in fact vortices with orbital angular momentum transferred from the pump.
We show that an optical vortex beam, implemented classically, can be transferred to the transverse amplitude of a heralded single photon. For this purpose we have relied on the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) for the generation of signal and idler photon pairs, using a pump in the form of a Bessel-Gauss (BG) beam with orbital angular momentum (specifically, with topological charge l = 1 and l = 2). We have designed our source so that it operates within the short SPDC crystal regime for which, the amplitude and phase of the pump may be transferred to a heralded single photon. In order to verify the vortex nature of our heralded single photon, we have shown that the conditional angular spectrum and the transverse intensity at the single-photon level match similar measurements carried out for the pump. In addition, we have shown that when our heralded single photon is diffracted through a triangular aperture, the far-field single-photon transverse intensity exhibits the expected triangular arrangement of intensity lobes associated with the presence of orbital angular momentum.
We demonstrate the generation of non-diffracting heralded single photons, i.e. which are characterized by a single-photon transverse intensity distribution which remains essentially unchanged over a significant propagation distance. For this purpose we have relied on the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) for the generation of signal and idler photon pairs, where our SPDC crystal is pumped by a Bessel-Gauss (BG) beam. Our experiment shows that the well-understood non-diffracting behavior of a BG beam may be directly mapped to the signal-mode, single photons heralded by the detection of a single idler photon. In our experiment, the heralded single photon is thus arranged to be non-diffracting without the need for projecting its single-photon transverse amplitude, post-generation, in any manner.
We study the generation of propagation invariant photons with orbital angular momentum by spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) using a Bessel-Gauss pump beam. The angular and conditional angular spectra are calculated for an uniaxial crystal optimized for type I SPDC with standard Gaussian pump beams. It is shown that, as the mean value of the magnitude of the transverse wave vector of the pump beam increases, the emission cone is deformed into two non-coaxial cones that touch each other along a line determined by the orientation of the optical axis of the nonlinear crystal. At this location, the conditional spectrum becomes maximal for a pair of photons, one of which is best described by a Gaussian-like photon with a very small transverse wave vector, and the other a Bessel-Gauss photon with a distribution of transverse wave vectors similar in amplitude to that of the incident pump beam. A detailed analysis is then performed of the angular momentum content of SPDC photons by the evaluation of the corresponding transition amplitudes. As a result, we obtain conditions for the generation of heralded single photons which are approximately propagation invariant and have orbital angular momentum. A discussion is given about the difficulties in the interpretation of the results in terms of conservation of optical orbital angular momentum along the vector normal to the crystal surface. The angular spectra and the conditional angular spectra are successfully compared with available experimental data recently reported in the literature.
We present an experimental and theoretical study of type I, frequency-degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) with a Bessel-Gauss pump in which we include both paraxial and nonparaxial pump beam configurations. We present measurements of the SPDC angular spectrum (AS), of the conditional angular spectrum (CAS) of signal-mode single photons as heralded by the detection of an idler photon, and of the transverse wave-vector signal-idler correlations (TWC). We show that as the pump is made increasingly nonparaxial, the AS acquires a nonconcentric double-cone structure, with the CAS shape depending on the azimuthal location of the heralding detector, while the signal-idler wave-vector correlation region splits into characteristic doublet stripes, representing as yet unexplored nontrivial, nonlocal quantum correlations between the signal and idler photons. Our work provides further understanding of SPDC with a particular class of structured pump beams, and we believe that the controlled presence of double wave-vector correlations represents an interesting resource for photon-pair quantum-state engineering.
We present a theoretical and experimental analysis of the joint effects of the transverse electric field distribution and of the nonlinear crystal characteristics on the properties of photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC). While it is known that for a sufficiently short crystal the pump electric field distribution fully determines the joint signal–idler properties, for longer crystals the nonlinear crystal properties also play an important role. In this paper we present experimental measurements of the angular spectrum (AS) and of the conditional angular spectrum (CAS) of photon pairs produced by SPDC, carried out through spatially resolved photon counting. In our experiment we control whether or not the source operates in the short-crystal regime through the degree of pump focusing, and explicitly show how the AS and CAS measurements differ in these two regimes. Our theory provides an understanding of the boundary between these two regimes and also predicts the corresponding differing behaviors.
We present a full vectorial analysis of the parametric downconversion process using a pump Bessel beam and a photon description based on Bessel wavefunctions. We find that, under the considered geometry, optical angular momentum is conserved but the crystal induces a coupling between the optical spin angular momentum (SAM) and the optical orbital angular momentum (OAM) ruled by the nonlinear properties of the crystal via the second order susceptibility tensor ?ijk(2). This leads to nontrivial correlations between the expected values of the SAM and OAM of the resulting two-photon states. Distributions of orbital angular momentum of the downconverted photons are evaluated in detail for a specific set-up.