Effects of spectral entanglement in polarization-entanglement swapping and type-I fusion gates

We examine how spectral entanglement in polarization-entangled photon states generated from bulk-crystal, spontaneous parametric down-conversion affects the success of entanglement swapping and type-I fusion gates. We quantify the success of the entanglement swapping and fusion gates by calculating the bipartite concurrence and residual tangle, respectively, in terms of the joint spectral probability amplitudes of the initial broad-bandwidth polarization-entangled states. We find that both polarization-entanglement measures depend strongly on the initial spectral entanglement, as well as on the configuration of the independent sources. Specifically, when spectral differences correlate with polarization, the optimal source configuration is different for the two protocols. We conclude that this distinction is founded in how the underlying Bell-state measurement and quantum-erasure techniques respond differently to distinguishing spectral information.