A 2-D study of intensity correlation of single photon pairs in spontaneous parametric down conversion

Summary form only given. Entangled photons are the workhorse of quantum information technology and cryptography. So far, the emphasis has been on entanglement of the polarization state (for type II down conversion), or of the wave vectors of the degenerate signal and idler pair (for type I down conversion). A subject of current interest is entanglement in the spatial domain, i.e. nontrivial, spatially extended, correlation between signal and idler. A prime example of this being the discussion regarding the conservation and entanglement of orbital angular momentum in spontaneous parametric down conversion. We report our very first measurements of the signal-idler correlation in type I down conversion, employing a frequency-doubled femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser as our source of pump photons, and a fourth generation intensified CCD as our "multi-element single-photon detector" With pump pulses at /spl lambda/ = 400 nm of approximately 2 nJ energy and 250 fs duration directed at a 0.5 mm long BBO crystal we detect roughly one pair in every four frames.