We report an experimental generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cold atomic ensemble. A single Stokes photon and one spin-wave excitation are simultaneously created via spontaneous Raman scattering. T...We report an experimental generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cold atomic ensemble. A single Stokes photon and one spin-wave excitation are simultaneously created via spontaneous Raman scattering. The spin-wave excitation is then converted into an anti-Stokes photon via an electromagnetic-induced-transparency reading process. The measured cross-correlation functions between the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons for two orthogonal polarizations are -75 and 74, respectively, at a generation rate of the photon pair of -60/s. Based on such correlations, we obtain polarization-entangled photon pairs, whose Bell parameter is S = 2.77 4- 0.01, violating Bell-CHSH inequality by -77 standard deviations. The presented polarization-entangled photon source has high entanglement degree and fast generation rate, which will promise us to apply it in future quantum repeater.展开更多
基金the National Basic Research Program of China (2010CB923103)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11475109, 11274211 and 60821004)
文摘We report an experimental generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cold atomic ensemble. A single Stokes photon and one spin-wave excitation are simultaneously created via spontaneous Raman scattering. The spin-wave excitation is then converted into an anti-Stokes photon via an electromagnetic-induced-transparency reading process. The measured cross-correlation functions between the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons for two orthogonal polarizations are -75 and 74, respectively, at a generation rate of the photon pair of -60/s. Based on such correlations, we obtain polarization-entangled photon pairs, whose Bell parameter is S = 2.77 4- 0.01, violating Bell-CHSH inequality by -77 standard deviations. The presented polarization-entangled photon source has high entanglement degree and fast generation rate, which will promise us to apply it in future quantum repeater.