English

Theory and experiment of entanglement in a quasi-phase-matched two-crystal source

Quantum Physics 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

We report new results regarding a source of polarization entangled photon-pairs created by the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion in two orthogonally oriented, periodically poled, bulk KTiOPO4 crystals (PPKTP). The source emits light colinearly at the non-degenerate wavelengths of 810 nm and 1550 nm, and is optimized for single-mode optical fiber collection and long-distance quantum communication. The configuration favors long crystals, which promote a high photon-pair production rate at a narrow bandwidth, together with a high pair-probability in fibers. The quality of entanglement is limited by chromatic dispersion, which we analyze by determining the output state. We find that such a decoherence effect is strongly material dependent, providing for long crystals an upper bound on the visibility of the coincidence fringes of 41% for KTiOPO4, and zero for LiNbO3. The best obtained raw visibility, when canceling decoherence with an extra piece of crystal, was 91 \pm 0.2%, including background counts. We confirm by a violation of the CHSH-inequality (S = 2.679 \pm 0.004 at 55 s^{-1/2} standard deviations) and by complete quantum state tomography that the fibers carry high-quality entangled pairs at a maximum rate of 55 x 10^3 s^{-1}THz^{-1}mW^{-1}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0510218,
  title  = {Theory and experiment of entanglement in a quasi-phase-matched two-crystal source},
  author = {Daniel Ljunggren and Maria Tengner and Philip Marsden and Matthew Pelton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0510218},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

12 pages, 10 figures, REVTeX4