Properties of pulsed entangled two-photon fields

The dependence of one- and two-photon characteristics of pulsed entangled two-photon fields generated in spontaneous parametric down-conversion on the pump-pulse properties (shape of the pump-pulse spectrum and its internal structure) is examined. It is shown that entangled two-photon fields with defined properties can be generated. A general relation between the spectra of the down-converted fields is established. As a special case interference of two partially overlapping pulsed two-photon fields is studied. Fourth-order interference pattern of entangled two-photon fields is investigated in the polarization analog of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer.Comment: LATEX2e, 8 pages, 9 PostScript figure

Noise reduction in photon counting by exploiting spatial correlations

Joint photocount distributions of a weak twin beam acquired by an iCCD camera are analyzed with respect to the beam spatial correlations. A method for extracting these correlations from the experimental joint photocount distributions is suggested using a suitable statistical model that quantifies the contribution of spatial correlations to the joint photocount distributions. In detail, the profile of twin-beam intensity spatial cross-correlation function is revealed from the curve that gives the genuine mean photon-pair number (both photons from a pair are detected) as a function of the extent of the detection area. Also, the principle of reducing the noise in photon-number-resolving detection by using spatial correlations is experimentally demonstrated.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure