Ultrabright Sagnac-type source of non-degenerate polarization-entangled photon pairs using only off-the-shelf optical components

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly stable, ultrabright, non-degenerate polarization-entangled photon pair source using a simple Sagnac interferometer and off-the-shelf components, achieving high brightness and fidelity without active stabilization.

Contribution

Developed a compact, stable, and ultrabright Sagnac-type entangled photon source using only commercial optical components, with high brightness and fidelity, and no need for custom optics or active stabilization.

Findings

Achieved a coincidence rate of approximately 69,600 pairs/sec/mW at low pump power.

Measured entangled state fidelity of about 96.72%.

Reported one of the highest brightness levels for non-degenerate polarization-entangled photon pairs.

Abstract

We develop a Sagnac-type source of ultrabright, non-degenerate, polarization-entangled photon pair that is highly stable and compact simultaneously. We use a $20~\text{mm}$ long PPLN bulk crystal which, upon pumping continuously with $532~\text{nm}$ wavelength, produces polarization-entangled photon-pairs of $785~\text{nm}$ signal and $1651~\text{nm}$ idler wavelengths via the type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process. All optical components used in the setup are off-the-shelf components, readily available commercially; hence, no custom-designed or costly multi-wavelength polarization optics are required. At the same time, long-term phase stability is achieved without any additional active stabilization; due to the geometry of our Sagnac-type design. We also report one of the highest brightness of non-degenerate polarization-entangled photon pairs available in the literature. Even with a very low pump power of $0.034~\text{mW}$, we detect a coincidence rate of $(6.96\pm 0.03)\times10^{4}$ entangled pairs/sec/mW (averaged over three polarization-basis measurements: H/V, D/A, and R/L basis). The source's brightness is calculated to be $(6.17\pm 0.04)\times10^{6}$ entangled pairs/sec/mW for the signal line width of $0.4~\text{nm}$. From the raw coincidence counts (without any background coincidence correction), the fidelity of the entangled state is measured to be $(96.72\pm 0.01)\%$ with a concurrence of $(94.68\pm 0.20)\%$. Bell-CHSH inequality violation is reported as $S=2.71\pm 0.06$.