Randomly poled crystals as a source of photon pairs

Generation of photon pairs from randomly poled nonlinear crystals is investigated using analytically soluble model and numerical calculations. Randomly poled crystals are discovered as sources of entangled ultra broad-band signal and idler fields. Their photon-pair generation rates scale linearly with the number of domains. Entanglement times as short as several fs can be reached. Comparison with chirped periodically-poled structures is given and reveals close similarity.