Polarization optics of biphotons

The works devoted to studying the polarization properties of a two-photon light generated upon spontaneous parametric down-conversion in the collinear frequency-degenerate regime are briefly overviewed, with emphasis on the studies carried out by us over a period from 1999 to 2001 within the framework of the project "Polarization Optics of Biphotons" of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. In particular, the polarization state of a two-photon light was analyzed and its pictorial mapping onto the Poincare sphere was proposed. The experiments on polarization transformations of a two-photon light were performed; based on these transformations, a method was suggested for ternary quantum information coding. A two-photon state with the orthogonal photon polarizations was synthesized experimentally from the two beams of identically polarized correlated photons, and the spectral properties of this state were investigated. Finally, a method was suggested for measuring the polarization state of a two-photon light in the collinear frequency-degenerate case ("tomography"). (C) 2002 MAIK "Nauka / Interperiodica".