Multiplexing heralded single photons in orbital-angular-momentum space

Abstract

Heralded single-photon source (HSPS) with competitive single photon purity and indistinguishability has become an essential resource for photonic quantum information processing. Here, for the first time, we proposed a theoretical regime to enhance heralded single-photons generation by multiplexing the degree of the freedom of orbital angular momentum (OAM) of down-converted entangled photon pairs emitted from a nonlinear crystal. Experimentally, a proof-of-principle experiment has been performed through multiplexing three OAM modes. We achieve a 47$\%$ enhancement in single photon rate. A second-order autocorrelation function $g^{(2)}(0)<0.5$ ensures our multiplexed heralded single photons with good single photon purity. We further indicate that an OAM-multiplexed HSPS with high quality can be constructed by generating higher dimensional entangled state and sorting them with high efficiency in OAM space. Our avenue may approach a good HSPS with the deterministic property.