We report a fully fibered source emitting cross time-bin entangled photons at 1540 nm from type-II spontaneous parametric down conversion. Compared to standard time-bin entanglement realizations, the preparation interferometer requires no phase stabilization, simplifying its implementation in quantum key distribution experiments. Franson/Bell-type tests of such a cross time-bin state are performed and lead to two-photon interference raw visibilities greater than 95%, which are only limited by the dark-counts in the detectors and imperfections in the analysis system. Just by trusting the randomness of the beam-splitters, the correlations generated by the source can be proved of non-classical origin even in a passive implementation. The obtained results confirm the suitability of this source for time-bin based quantum key distribution.
@article{arxiv.1207.6586,
title = {Cross time-bin photonic entanglement for quantum key distribution},
author = {A. Martin and F. Kaiser and A. Vernier and A. Beveratos and V. Scarani and S. Tanzilli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.6586},
year = {2015}
}