Effects of anisotropy in a nonlinear crystal for squeezed vacuum generation

Abstract

Squeezed vacuum (SV) can be obtained by an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with the quantum vacuum state at the input. We are interested in a degenerate type-I OPA based on parametric down-conversion (PDC) where due to phase matching requirements, an extraordinary polarized pump must impinge onto a birefringent crystal with a large \chi(2) nonlinearity. As a consequence of the optical anisotropy of the medium, the direction of propagation of the pump wavevector does not coincide with the direction of propagation of its energy, an effect known as transverse walk-off. For certain pump sizes and crystal lengths, the transverse walk-off has a strong influence on the spatial spectrum of the generated radiation, which in turn affects the outcome of any experiment in which this radiation is employed. In this work we propose a method that reduces the distortions of the two-photon amplitude (TPA) of the states considered, by using at least two consecutive crystals instead of one. We show that after anisotropy compensation the TPA becomes symmetric, allowing for a simple Schmidt expansion, a procedure that in practice requires states that come from experimental systems free of anisotropy effects.