Experimental Demonstration of Polarization Entanglement from a Spatiotemporally Incoherent Source

Abstract

Spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC)-based sources of photonic entangled states are usually generated using coherent pump fields. For temporal, spatial, and polarization degree of freedom, the down-converted light entanglement is limited by the coherence of the pump in the same degree of freedom. However, the effect of pump coherence on the entanglement in a different degree of freedom remains largely unexplored. Here we experimentally demonstrate the generation of polarization entanglement from SPDC pumped by a light emitting diode (LED), a spatiotemporally incoherent pump. The two-photon state is found to have a concurrence of 0.562 and purity of 0.647.