a big focus of my research is buying bespoke optics components and repurposing them for quantum optics experiments and the relative abundance of KTP (potassium titanyl phosphate) along with micro electrodes motivated me (among others things) to try and see if current setups using BBO (beta-barium borate) can be enhanced with modified components that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to integrate into existing systems.
Measuring the degree of polarization-entanglement is the next step and it too uses a lot of off-the-shelf technology but, again, restructured for a different purpose. In many instances the research goal is to create new architectures in networks that already exist in the classical domain. As a point of fact a lot of my research has taken me into bridging classical networks and their components into the emerging field of "quantum" networks. In many ways the components for "quantum" networks already exist, the networks themselves just have to be tailored with a different approach than before.
