An integrable optical-fiber source of polarization entangled photon-pairs in the telecom band

Abstract

We demonstrate an optical-fiber based source of polarization entangled photon-pairs with improved quality and efficiency, which has been integrated with off-the-shelf telecom components and is, therefore, well suited for quantum communication applications in the 1550 nm telecom band. Polarization entanglement is produced by simultaneously pumping a loop of standard dispersion-shifted fiber with two orthogonally-polarized pump pulses, one propagating in the clockwise and the other in the counter-clockwise direction. We characterize this source by investigating two-photon interference between the generated signal-idler photon-pairs under various conditions. The experimental parameters are carefully optimized to maximize the generated photon-pair correlation and to minimize contamination of the entangled photon-pairs from extraneously scattered background photons that are produced by the pump pulses for two reasons: i) spontaneous Raman scattering causes uncorrelated photons to be emitted in the signal/idler bands and ii) broadening of the pump-pulse spectrum due to self-phase modulation causes pump photons to leak into the signal/idler bands. We obtain two-photon interference with visibility $>90$% without subtracting counts caused by the background photons (only dark counts of the detectors are subtracted), when the mean photon number in the signal (idler) channel is about 0.02/pulse, while no interference is observed in direct detection of either the signal or the idler photons.

4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. A

References in corpus (6)

• Optical-fiber source of polarization-entangled photon pairs in the 1550nm telecom band
• Generation of polarization entangled photon pairs and violation of Bell's inequality using spontaneous four-wave mixing in fiber loop
• Heralding Single Photons from Pulsed Parametric Down-Conversion
• Effective fiber-coupling of entangled photons for quantum communication
• Efficient generation of correlated photon pairs in a microstructure fiber
• Optimal coupling of entangled photons into single-mode optical fibers

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Generating polarization-entangled photon pairs using cross-spliced birefringent fibers
• Quantum efficiency measurement of single photon detectors using photon pairs generated in optical fibers
• Photon-pair generation by non-instantaneous spontaneous four-wave mixing
• Generation of Photon Pairs in Dispersion Shift Fibers through Spontaneous Four Wave Mixing: Influence of Self-phase Modulation
• Proposal for an Integrated Raman-free Correlated Photon Source