The influence of the carrier-envelope phase of a femtosecond pump laser pulse on spontaneous parametric down-conversion is investigated. We show that the coincidence rates and joint spectrum intensity of the generated entangled biphotons are modified.
We investigate spectral and temporal features and entanglement of biphoton wave packets formed in spontaneous parametric down-conversion with a pulsed laser pump. The degree of entanglement is characterized by the experimentally measurable parameter R defined as the ratio of the coincidence and single-particle spectral widths. In the frequency representation, this parameter is found as a function of the pump-pulse duration $\ensuremath{\tau}$. The function $R(\ensuremath{\tau})$ is shown to have a minimum and even in the minimum, at rather natural conditions, the degree of entanglement is found to be very high (Rmin=73). The Schmidt number K is found analytically for both short and long pump pulses and interpolated for arbitrary pulse durations. All functional dependences of R and K are found to be identical and numerical coefficients are found to be rather close. Two-time temporal wave function of a biphoton state is investigated in detail, and a rather significant difference between the cases of short and long pump pulses is found to occur. In the case of long pulses, the temporal parameter Rt (defined as the ratio of durations of the single-particle and coincidence signals) is shown to be very close to the Schmidt number K.
We report on experimental measurements of coincidence and single particle spectral shapes of biphoton signals when frequency entangled states are generated by SPDC crystals pumped by short pulses.It is shown evidence for biphoton coincidence spectrum narrower and single-particle one wider than the pump spectrum, with a large contrast between coincidence and singles distributions.The investigation of biphoton correlations has been performed by fixing one monochromator at the maximal transmission wavelength on down-converted signal gate and scanning the one placed in the idler branch in order to observe the spectral distribution of single counts and coincidences.The degree of entanglement is evaluated by the ratio of the FWHM of single particle and coincidence distributions: the greater the ratio, the greater is the entanglement.The degree of entanglement in frequency variables can be very high: it increases linearly with the length of the crystal, and decreases with the growing pump pulse.
We investigate, both numerically and experimentally, the optical parametric generation (OPG) process in second-order nonlinear crystals driven by femtosecond pulses. We model the OPG process by solving the coupled second-order three-wave nonlinear propagation equations in the plane-wave limit, using noise fields to mimic the vacuum fluctuations. We focus on two parameters: (i) the temporal jitter between the OPG and the pump pulse; (ii) the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) relationship between the OPG and the pump pulse. Both numerical simulations and experiments support the following conclusions: (i) in the regime of low pump depletion the OPG pulse is synchronized with the pump, but its energy presents strong fluctuations; (ii) in the regime of high pump depletion, the energy of the OPG pulse stabilizes, but a temporal jitter with respect to the pump pulse is introduced; (iii) in both cases, the CEP relationship between pump and OPG pulses is completely random.
Polarization-entangled photon pairs can be efficiently prepared into pure Bell states with a high fidelity via type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) of narrow-band pump light. However, the use of femtosecond pump pulses to generate multiphoton states with precise timing often requires spectral filtering to maintain a high quality of polarization entanglement. This typically reduces the efficiency of photon pair collection. We experimentally map the polarization correlations of photon pairs from such a source over a range of down-converted wavelengths with a high spectral resolution and find strong polarization correlations everywhere. A spectrally dependent imbalance between contributions from the two possible decay paths of SPDC is identified as the reason for a reduction in entanglement quality observed with femtosecond pump pulses. Our spectral measurements allow us to predict the polarization correlations for arbitrary filter profiles when the frequency degree of freedom of the photon pairs is ignored.