Temporally Distilled High-Dimensional Biphotonic States from Thin Sources

Abstract

Generation of entangled photons through spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) from micro-and nanoscale sources offers unprecedented freedom in quantum state engineering, including the ability to generate two-photon states with high-dimensional hyperentanglement. However, as the source of SPDC gets smaller, the role of photoluminescence increases, which leads to the contamination of two-photon states with a thermal background. Here we propose and implement a solution to this problem: by using pulsed SPDC and time distillation, we increase the purity and the heralding efficiency of the photon pairs. In the experiment, we increased the purity of the two-photon states generated in a 7 μm film of lithium niobate from 0.002 to 0.99. With the higher purity we were able to observe and characterize different polarization states of photon pairs generated simultaneously due to relaxed phase matching. In particular, we showed the presence of orthogonally polarized photons that are potentially usable for the generation of polarization entanglement.