Photon doughnut-shaped pair for easy production of entangled photon pairs

Abstract

Parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal-generated photon pair in which photons have orthogonal polarization. The pair was emitted in a cone shape for each polarization and collimated by a lens to be doughnut shaped. The doughnutlike photon pair runs collinear to the pump laser. The group delay and walk-off between the orthogonal polarization photons in the pair were compensated passing through a half-wave plate and a nonlinear crystal. Then, the photon doughnut pair was coupled into a 1 x 2 fiber together with a pump laser, i.e., the intense pump laser was used as a guide for alignment. After the alignment was finished, a cut filter was inserted in the optical path to cut the pump laser transmitting the photon doughnut pair. The coincidence measurement of the output of the 1 x 2 fiber showed that the photon pairs are entangled in polarization.