Direct measurement of transverse-mode entanglement in two-photon states

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a method to measure the Schmidt number of pure two-photon states entangled in transverse-mode structure. Our method is based on the connection between the Schmidt decomposition in quantum theory and the coherent-mode decomposition in classical coherence theory. We apply the method to two-photon states generated by spontaneous parametric down conversion and show that our results are in excellent agreement with numerical calculations based on the Schmidt decomposition.