Ultra stable all-fiber telecom-band entangled photon-pair source for turnkey quantum communication applications

We demonstrate a novel alignment-free all-fiber source for generating telecom-band polarization-entangled photon pairs. Polarization entanglement is created by injecting two relatively delayed, orthogonally polarized pump pulses into a piece of dispersion-shifted fiber, where each one independently engages in four-photon scattering, and then removing any distinguishability between the correlated photon-pairs produced by each pulse at the fiber output. Our scheme uses a Michelson-interferometer configuration with Faraday mirrors to achieve practically desirable features such as ultra-stable performance and turnkey operation. Up to 91.7% two-photon-interference visibility is observed without subtracting the accidental coincidences that arise from background photons while operating the source at room temperature. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.