A versatile source of polarization entangled photons for quantum network applications

Abstract

We report a versatile and practical approach for the generation of high-quality polarization entanglement in a fully guided-wave fashion. Our setup relies on a high-brilliance type-0 waveguide generator producing paired photons at a telecom wavelength associated with an advanced energy-time to polarization transcriber. The latter is capable of creating any pure polarization entangled state, and allows manipulation of single-photon bandwidths that can be chosen at will over five orders of magnitude, ranging from tens of MHz to several THz. We achieve excellent entanglement fidelities for particular spectral bandwidths, i.e. 25 MHz, 540 MHz and 80 GHz, proving the relevance of our approach. Our scheme stands as an ideal candidate for a wide range of network applications, ranging from dense division multiplexing quantum key distribution to heralded optical quantum memories and repeaters.