Experimental investigation in transmission performance of polarization-entangled photon-pairs generated by cascaded χ(2) processes over standard single-mode optical fibers

In this paper we report experimental investigation in transmission performance over standard single-mode optical fibers (SMFs) of polarization-entangled photon-pairs in a 1.5-mu m band generated by cascaded second-harmonic generation and spontaneous parametric down conversion (c-SHG/SPDC) from a periodically poled LiNbO3 (PPLN) ridge-waveguide device. Clear two-photon interference fringes were observed even after the transmission over 140 km of the SMF spools, remaining small degradation in the visibilities of less than 3%. The performance was also investigated by using optical attenuators, instead of the SMF spools, to study the maximum reach of the distribution of the entanglement in terms of loss penalty. The results show that the quantum entanglement could be distributed even with 50 dB of the transmission loss with violation of Bell inequality by using the c-SHG/SPDC-based photon-pair source. (C)2012 Optical Society of America