Pulsed Sagnac polarization-entangled photon source with a PPKTP crystal at telecom wavelength

We demonstrate pulsed polarization-entangled photons generated from a periodically poled KTiOPO4 (PPKTP) crystal in a Sagnac interferometer configuration at telecom wavelength. Since the group-velocity-matching (GVM) condition is satisfied, the intrinsic spectral purity of the photons is much higher than in the previous scheme at around 800 nm wavelength. The combination of a Sagnac interferometer and the GVM-PPKTP crystal makes our entangled source compact, stable, highly entangled, spectrally pure and ultra-bright. The photons were detected by two superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs) with detection efficiencies of 70% and 68% at dark counts of less than 1 kcps. We achieved fidelities of 0.981 +/- 0.0002 for vertical bar psi(-)> and 0.980 +/- 0.001 for vertical bar psi(+)> respectively. This GVM-PPKTP-Sagnac scheme is directly applicable to quantum communication experiments at telecom wavelength, especially in free space. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America