One of the most intriguing concepts of quantum mechanics is quantum entanglement. Two physical systems are said to be entangled with respect to a certain variable, if their individual outcomes of... Show moreOne of the most intriguing concepts of quantum mechanics is quantum entanglement. Two physical systems are said to be entangled with respect to a certain variable, if their individual outcomes of the variable are undetermined before measurement, but strictly correlated. Measurement of the variable for only one system immediately determines the outcome for the other system, irrespective of the distance between the two systems. It is this strong correlation that provides a basis for perspective, powerful applications like quantum cryptography and quantum computation. The most studied entangled systems, often called EPR systems (after the pioneers Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen), are pairs of light particles or photon pairs. These photon pairs, usually generated via the optical process of a spontaneous parametric down-conversion, are, in principal, simultaneously entangled in three variables, being polarization (polarization entanglement), energy or time (time entanglement), and momentum or transverse space (spatial entanglement). The contents of this thesis cover new insights in the polarization and spatial entanglement of photons. We have investigated both the entanglement quality and the yield of entangled photons for different experimental geometries that are associated with the production and detection of the photons. Show less
