Stimulated emission tomography for efficient characterization of spatial entanglement

Stimulated emission tomography (SET) is an excellent tool for characterizing the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), which is commonly used to create pairs of entangled photons for use in quantum information protocols. The use of stimulated emission increases the average number of detected photons by several orders of magnitude compared to the spontaneous process. In a SET measurement, the parametric down-conversion is seeded by an intense signal field prepared with specified mode properties rather than by broadband multi-modal vacuum fluctuations, as is the case for the spontaneous process. The SET process generates an intense idler field in a mode that is the complex conjugate to the signal mode. In this work we use SET to estimate the joint spatial mode distribution (JSMD) in the Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) basis of the two photons of an entangled photon pair. The pair is produced by parametric down-conversion in a beta barium borate (BBO) crystal with type-II phase matching pumped at a wavelength of 405 nm along with a 780-nm seed signal beam prepared in a variety of LG modes to generate an 842-nm idler beam of which the spatial mode distribution is measured. We observe strong idler production and good agreement with the theoretical prediction of its spatial mode distribution. Our experimental procedure should enable the efficient determination of the photon-pair wavefunctions produced by low-brightness SPDC sources and the characterization of high-dimensional entangled-photon pairs.