A bright PPKTP waveguide source of polarization entangled photons
Michael L. Fanto, Christopher C. Tison, Gregory A. Howland, Stefan F. Preble, Paul M. Alsing, A. Matthew Smith · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2015
The need for bright efficient sources of entangled photons has been a subject of tremendous research over the last decade. Researchers have been working to increase the brightness and purity to help overcome the spontaneous nature of the sources. Periodic poling has been implemented to allow for the use of crystals that would not normally satisfy the phase matching conditions. Utilizing periodic poling and single mode waveguide confinement of the pump field has yielded extremely large effective nonlinearities in sources easily producing millions of photon pairs. Here we will demonstrate these large nonlinearity effects in a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate (PPKTP) waveguide as well as characterizing the source purity.