Dispersion Measurement Method with Down Conversion Process

Proper characterization of nonlinear crystals is essential for designing single photon sources. We show a technique for dispersion characterization of a nonlinear material by making use of phase matching in the process of parametric down conversion. Our method is demonstrated on an exemplary periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate KTiOPO_4 crystal phase-matched for 396 nm to 532 nm and 1550 nm. We show a procedure to characterize the dispersion in the range of 390 to 1800 nm by means of only one spectrometer for the UV-visible range.