Postselection-Free Cavity-Enhanced Narrow-Band Orbital Angular Momentum Entangled Photon Source

Cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) provides a significant way to produce ∼10 MHz narrow-band photon pairs, which matches the bandwidth of photon for quantum memory. However, the output photon pairs from the cavity are not entangled, and postselection is required to create the entanglement so far, so the direct output of cavity-enhanced narrow-band entangled photon pairs is still an open challenge. Here, we propose a solution that realizes the first postselection-free cavity-enhanced narrow-band entangled photon pairs. The entanglement is achieved in degree of freedom of orbital angular momentum (OAM) by an OAM-conservation SPDC process in an actively and precisely controlled cavity supporting degenerate high-order OAM modes. The measured linewidth and fidelity are 13.8 MHz and 0.969(3), respectively, for the directly generated OAM entangled two photons. We deterministically transfer the OAM entanglement to polarization one with almost no loss and obtain polarization entangled two photons with a fidelity of 0.948(2). Moreover, we produce narrow-band OAM-polarization hyperentangled photon pairs with a fidelity of 0.850(2), which is realized by interfering the two photons on a polarizing beam splitter (PBS) and postselecting the events of one and only one photon on each PBS port. Novel cavity may find applications in cavity-based light-matter interaction. Our results provide an efficient and promising approach to create narrow-band entangled photon sources for memory-based long-distance quantum communication and network.