Abstract

It is known that the entanglement present in the transverse spatial properties of photon pairs generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion depends explicitly on the characteristics of the pump laser beam. Here we show that, for pump beams described by a Hermite-Gaussian mode, the entanglement depends on the beam width as well as the order of the beam. The amount of entanglement generally increases with the order of the beam and is less dependent on the beam width for higher orders. We propose a method to measure the spatial entanglement directly, independent of the dimension of the subsystems.