Towards a High Quality Polarization-Entangled Multi-photon Source

Abstract

Generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs with a precise timing through down-conversion of femtosecond pulses is often faced with a degraded polarization entanglement quality. This degradation is induced by spectral distinguishability between the two decay paths, in accordance with theoretical predictions. In this thesis, I present an experimental study of the spectral compensation scheme proposed and first implemented by Kim <i>et. al.</i> [Y.-H Kim and W. P. Grice, J. Mod. Opt. <b>49</b>, 2309 (2002) ]. By measuring the joint spectral properties of the polarization correlations of the photon pairs, we show that the spectral distinguishability between the down-converted components is eliminated. This scheme results in a visibility of 97.9 &#177; 0.5% in the complementary polarization basis without any spectral filtering.