Generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cold atomic ensemble

Abstract

We report an experimental generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cold atomic ensemble. A single Stokes photon and one spin-wave excitation are simultaneously created via spontaneous Raman scattering. The spin-wave excitation is then converted into an anti-Stokes photon via an electromagnetic-induced-transparency reading process. The measured cross-correlation functions between the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons for two orthogonal polarizations are ~75 and 74, respectively, at a generation rate of the photon pair of ~60/s. Based on such correlations, we obtain polarization-entangled photon pairs, whose Bell parameter is S = 2.77 ± 0.01, violating Bell-CHSH inequality by ~77 standard deviations. The presented polarization-entangled photon source has high entanglement degree and fast generation rate, which will promise us to apply it in future quantum repeater.