Demonstration of a programmable source of two-photon multiqubit entangled states

We suggest and demonstrate a novel source of two-photon multipartite entangled states which exploits the transverse spatial structure of spontaneous parametric down-conversion together with a programmable spatial light modulator (SLM). The one-dimensional SLM is used to perform polarization entanglement purification and to realize arbitrary phase gates between polarization and momentum degrees of freedom of photons. We experimentally demonstrate our scheme by generating two-photon three-qubit linear cluster states with high fidelity using a diode laser pump with a limited coherence time and power on the crystal as low as {approx}2.5 mW.