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    Full-field mapping of spatially varying polarization entanglement generated from spontaneous parametric down-conversion

    Cheng Li1,*,†, Girish Kulkarni1,2, Isaac Soward1, Yingwen Zhang1,3, Jeremy Upham1, Duncan England3, Andrei Nomerotski4,5, Ebrahim Karimi1,3,6, and Robert Boyd1,7,‡

    • *Contact author: cli7@lbl.gov
    • †Present address: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
    • ‡Contact author: rboyd@uottawa.ca

    Phys. Rev. Applied 26, 014038 – Published 13 July, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/l9vh-14nj

    Abstract

    Two-photon states generated from spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) can display entanglement in all degrees of freedom (DoFs) of light, including spatial, temporal, and polarization. The coupling between different DoFs of a two-photon state has been shown to display rich structures that enable novel and robust information processing schemes. While the existing literature has studied these couplings by postselecting the SPDC field, a comprehensive understanding of the inherent spatial-polarization coupling produced in the SPDC process is still lacking. This work produces a full spatial map of the polarization entanglement generated across the entire SPDC field, which contains an entire class of near-maximally polarization-entangled states with an average concurrence of 0.8303±0.0004. The spatial-polarization coupling manifests as radially or linearly varying polarization-entangled states, whose wavefunctions are dependent on the transverse momenta of the down-converted photons and the pump beam, respectively. Our study lays important groundwork for further exploiting the coupling between entanglement in different DoFs for future quantum technologies.

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