Quantum state engineering with twisted photons via adaptive shaping of the pump beam

Abstract: High-dimensional entanglement is a valuable resource for quantum communication, and photon pairs entangled in orbital angular momentum are commonly used for encoding high-dimensional quantum states. However, methods for preparation of maximally entangled states of arbitrary dimensionality are still lacking, and currently used approaches essentially rely on filtering and entanglement concentration. Here we experimentally realize a method for generation of high-dimensional maximally entangled OAM states of photon pairs which does not require any of these procedures. Moreover, the prepared state is restricted to the subspace of the specified dimensionality, thus requiring minimal postselection.