Down-converted bi-photons in a Bessel-Gaussian basis

The OAM or spiral bandwidth indicates the dimensionality of an entangled state that is produced by the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process. Normally this bandwidth is determined by modulating the signal and idler beams with helical phase functions with opposite azimuthal indices on the spatial light modulators in the signal and idler beams, respectively. We added an additional binary Bessel function to the helical phase, thereby specifying the radial dependence of the mode to be Bessel-Gaussian (BG) modes. This comes down to a post selection process, which is known to have the ability to increase entanglement. The result is a modification to the shape of the OAM spectrum, which leads to a higher dimensionality for the quantum states. We perform analytical calculations to show that the bandwidths obtained by measuring in the BG modal basis are larger than those for the LG modes. These theoretical predictions are confirmed by experimental measurements of the bandwidths for LG modes and for BG modes with different transverse scales.

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