Generation of entangled photons with a second-order nonlinear photonic crystal and a beam splitter

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to generate entangled photons using a nonlinear photonic crystal and beam splitter, achieving higher efficiency and potential applications in quantum key distribution.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new approach utilizing a nonlinear photonic crystal to produce entangled photons with improved efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

Yield efficiency of 0.0783 entangled pairs per pulse

Conversion efficiency of about 4×10^{-6} in spontaneous parametric downconversion

Potential application in decoy-state quantum key distribution

Abstract

We discuss the generation of entangled photons using a nonlinear photonic crystal and beam splitter. In our method, the photonic crystal is assumed to be composed of a material with a large second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility $\chi^{(2)}$. Our proposal relies on two facts: (1) A nonlinear photonic crystal changes coherent incident light into squeezed light. (2) A beam splitter transforms the squeezed light into entangled light beams flying in two different directions. We estimate the yield efficiency of pairs of entangled photons per pulse of the very weak coherent light for our method at $0.0783$ for a specific concrete example. Our method is more effective because the conversion efficiency (entangled biphotons per incident pump photons) in the spontaneous parametric downconversion is of the order of $4\times 10^{-6}$. The only drawback is that it requires very fine tuning of the frequency of signal photons fed into the photonic crystal; for example, an adjustment is given by $\Delta\nu=3.11\times 10^{8}$ Hz for the signal light of $\nu=3.23\times 10^{14}$ Hz. We investigate the application of entangled photons produced by our method to the BB84 quantum key distribution protocol, and we explore how to detect an eavesdropper. We suggest that our method is promising for decoy-state quantum key distribution using weak coherent light.