Extracting an entangled photon pair from collectively decohered pairs at a telecommunication wavelength

We experimentally demonstrated entanglement extraction scheme by using photons at the telecommunication band for optical-fiber-based quantum communications. We generated two pairs of non-degenerate polarization entangled photons at 780 nm and 1551 nm by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and distributed the two photons at 1551 nm through a collective phase damping channel which gives the same amount of random phase shift on the two photons. Through local operation and classical communication, we extracted an entangled photon pair from two phase-disturbed photon pairs. An observed fidelity of the extracted photon pair to a maximally entangled photon pair was 0.73 ± 0.07 which clearly shows the recovery of entanglement.