12-25-2025, 08:26 AM
I'm a graduate student in physics, and I'm designing a lab experiment to demonstrate quantum entanglement for an undergraduate optics course, focusing on polarization-entangled photon pairs. While the theory is clear, the practical setup with beam splitters and coincidence counting is proving finicky. For others who have built similar tabletop demonstrations, what were the most critical alignment steps and common sources of noise that reduced visibility? How did you effectively explain the violation of Bell's inequality to students with varying math backgrounds, and are there any robust, cost-effective sources for producing the photon pairs that you'd recommend over a standard SPDC crystal setup? I'm also curious about software for simulating the expected correlations.