Entangled photon generation using four-wave mixing in azimuthally symmetric microresonators

A novel quantum mechanical formulation of the bi-photon wavefunction and spectra resulting from four-wave mixing is developed for azimuthally symmetric systems. Numerical calculations are performed verifying the use of the angular group velocity and angular group velocity dispersion in such systems, as opposed their commonly used linear counterparts. The dispersion profile and bi-photon spectra of two illustrative examples are given, emphasizing the physical origin of the effects leading to the conditions for angular momentum and energy conservation. A scheme is proposed in which widely spaced narrowband entangled photons may be produced through a four-wave mixing process in a chip-scale ring resonator. The entangled photon pairs are found to conserve energy and momentum in the four-wave mixing interaction, even though both photon modes lie in spectral regions of steep angular group velocity dispersion. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America