Efficient generation of a photon pair in a bulk periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate

In this report, we demonstrate the efficient generation of collinearly propagating photon pairs in a bulk periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate pumped by a cw laser. The detected coincidence counts are more than 7400/s with 3.58 mW pump power in a Hanbury-Brown-Twiss-type experiment. The estimated photon pair production rate is about 0.73 MHz/mW. This is very promising for some applications, such as quantum key distribution, proof of the Bell-inequality, preparation of single photon states in broadband wave packets, Franson-type interference and so on.