In this paper we study photon pairs generated in a nonlinear cavity composed of a nonlinear crystal surrounded by mirrors, by the process of spotaneous parametric downconversion. We analyze two different regimes: singly-resonant cavities where the signal and idler modes are resonant and doubly-resonant cavities where the pump mode is also resonant. We present analytic expressions for the joint spectral amplitude in these two cases and study the reduction in emission bandwidth as the cavity coefficient finesse is increased. We also study the enhancement of the source brightness from the presence of the cavity.

The purpose of this tutorial paper is to present a broad overview of photon-pair generation through the spontaneous four wave mixing (SFWM) process in optical fibers. Progress in optical fiber technology means that today we have at our disposal a wide variety of types of fiber, which, together with the fact that SFWM uses two pump fields, implies a truly remarkable versatility in the resulting possible photon-pair properties. We discuss how the interplay of frequency, transverse mode, and polarization degrees of freedom—the first linked to the latter two through fiber dispersion—leads to interesting entanglement properties both in individual degrees of freedom and also permitting hybrid and hyper entanglement in combinations of degrees of freedom. This tutorial covers methods for photon-pair factorability, frequency tunability, and SFWM bandwidth control, the effect of frequency non-degenerate and counterpropagating pumps, as well as methods for characterizing photon pairs generated in optical fibers.

We report spontaneous parametric downconversion having an unusually wide spectral bandwidth. A collinear type 1 phase-matching configuration is employed with degeneracy near the zero group-velocity dispersion frequency. With a spectral width of $1080\mathrm{nm}$ and degenerate wavelength of $1885\mathrm{nm}$, the source also emits a high flux of $3.4\times {10}^{11}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}{\mathrm{W}}^{-1}$ photon pairs constrained to a cone of only $\approx 2°$ half-angle. A rigorous theoretical approach is developed that confirms the experimental observations. The source properties are consistent with an ultrashort photon-pair correlation time and, for a narrowband pump, extremely high-dimensional spectral entanglement.

Optical fibers have been considered an optimal platform for third-order parametric down-conversion since they can potentially overcome the weak third-order nonlinearity by their long interaction length. Here we present, in the first part, a theoretical derivation for the conversion rate both in the case of spontaneous generation and in the presence of a seed beam. Then we review three types of optical fibers and we examine their properties in terms of conversion efficiency and practical feasibility.

Optical-coherence tomography (OCT) is a technique that employs light in order to measure the internal structure of semitransparent, e.g. biological, samples. It is based on the interference pattern of low-coherence light. Quantum-OCT (QOCT), instead, employs the correlation properties of entangled photon pairs, for example, generated by the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC). The usual QOCT scheme uses photon pairs characterised by a joint-spectral amplitude with strict spectral anti-correlations. It has been shown that, in contrast with its classical counterpart, QOCT provides resolution enhancement and dispersion cancellation. In this paper, we revisit the theory of QOCT and extend the theoretical model so as to include photon pairs with arbitrary spectral correlations. We present experimental results that complement the theory and explain the physical underpinnings appearing in the interference pattern. In our experiment, we utilize a pump for the SPDC process ranging from continuous wave to pulsed in the femtosecond regime, and show that cross-correlation interference effects appearing for each pair of layers may be directly suppressed for a sufficiently large pump bandwidth. Our results provide insights and strategies that could guide practical implementations of QOCT.