Producing Polarization Entangled States Using a Bright Single Photon Source
Morgan Mastrovich, Master's Student
The quantum optics community has been producing entangled photon pairs via well-understood nonlinear processes for decades. Additionally, several groups have used linear optics to overlap entangled pairs to probabilistically produce larger polarization entangled states. And recently, quantum dots have emerged as attractive alternate sources for both single photons and entangled pairs. In this seminar, I will present a scheme to overlap single photons from a bright quantum dot source to produce polarization-entangled states, starting with two photons and eventually scaling to larger states. Though our current scheme is probabilistic, we still expect much higher rates of entangled state production than previously reported sources, and have the potential to move toward a deterministic scheme.
This talk aims to provide an overview of existing sources of polarization-entangled photons as context for understanding the advantages and drawbacks of our scheme. I will also present our experimental progress in measuring and improving the indistinguishability of subsequent photons from our quantum dot source, a necessary first step to producing entangled states.