Generation of Polarization-Entangled Photons in a Standard Polarization-Maintaining Fiber

Abstract

We demonstrate the capability of standard, commercially available polarization-maintaining fibers (PMFs) to generate polarization-entangled photon-pairs by inserting a PMF source into a Sagnac interferometer. We perform a quantum state tomography to reconstruct the density matrix, yielding, without background subtraction or spectral filtering, a polarization-entangled photon-pair state with 92.37 ± 0.14% fidelity to the maximally entangled Bell state. With its high coupling efficiency into SMFs and ability to produce spectrally uncorrelated photons, we expect this source to be useful for free-space and fiber-based quantum information protocols.