Selecting the pre-detection characteristics for fiber coupling of parametric down-converted biphoton modes

Photon modes have an important role in characterizing the quantum sources of light. The two main pre-detection factors affecting the biphoton mode coupling in SPDC are the pump beam focusing parameter and the crystal thickness. We present the numerical and experimental results on the effect of pump focusing on conditional down-converted photon modes for a Type-I BBO crystal. We experimentally verify that biphoton coupling efficiency decreases asymptotically with pump beam focusing parameter. We attribute this behaviour to (a) the asymmetry in the spatial distribution of down-converted photons with the pump beam focusing parameter and (b) the ellipticity of biphoton modes introduced due to the focusing of the pump beam. We also show the ellipticity experimentally as well as quantify it with the focusing parameter. These results may be useful in selecting optimum conditions for generating efficient fiber coupled sources of heralded single photons and entangled photons for quantum information applications.