Evaluation of polarization entanglement generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion using photon number counting

Spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) is widely used to generate entangled photon pairs; however, multi-pair emissions degrade the quality of the entanglement. We numerically evaluate polarization-entangled photon pairs created by SPDC. The effects of multi-pair emission events on the visibility of two-photon interference and on the fidelity (the probability overlap for ideal and real states) are analyzed using single-photon detectors that can count the number of incoming photons and discard multiphoton events. Compared with conventional threshold single-photon detectors, photon-number resolving single-photon detectors have higher fidelity for the same or lower visibility.