Bandwidth control of the biphoton wavefunction exploiting spatio-temporal correlations

Abstract

In this work we study the spatio-temporal correlations of photons produced by spontaneous parametric down conversion. In particular, we study how the waists of the detection and pump beams impact on the spectral bandwidth of the photons. Our results indicate that this parameter is greatly affected by the spatial properties of the detection beam, while not as much by the pump beam. This allows for a simple experimental implementation to control the bandwidth of the biphoton spectra, which only entails modifying the optical configuration to collect the photons. Moreover, we have performed Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry measurements that also provide the phase of the biphoton wavefunction, and thereby its temporal shape. We explain all these results with a toy model derived under certain approximations, which accurately recovers most of the interesting experimental details.