Tunable entanglement distillation of spatially correlated down-converted photons

We report on a new technique for entanglement distillation of the bipartite continuous variable state of spatially correlated photons generated in the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process ( SPDC), where tunable non-Gaussian operations are implemented and the post-processed entanglement is certified in real-time using a single-photon sensitive electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD) camera. The local operations are performed using non-Gaussian filters modulated into a programmable spatial light modulator and, by using the EMCCD camera for actively recording the probability distributions of the twin-photons, one has fine control of the Schmidt number of the distilled state. We show that even simple non-Gaussian filters can be finely tuned to a similar to 67% net gain of the initial entanglement generated in the SPDC process. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement