Tailoring orbital angular momentum entanglement through inverse design based on gradient descent

• Inverse design based on gradient descent for tailoring orbital angular momentum entanglement is presented. • A physics-informed model by combining the backpropagation and the overlap integral is constructed. • Generation of maximally entangled states in different dimensions is demonstrated numerically and experimentally. • The inverse design approach is a universal tool to control quantitatively the distributions of coincidence probability. High-dimensional quantum entanglement is an important resource for fundamental research and quantum technological application. Recently, the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light has received much attention to realize high-dimensional quantum systems, and generating and manipulating the OAM entanglement has become an important topic. Here, we propose an inverse design technique to manipulate the OAM entanglement of the photon pair generated through spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The proposed technique directly tailors the OAM states of entangled photon pairs by shaping the incident pump beam. In particular, we construct a physics-informed model by leveraging the backpropagation algorithm and adhering to the overlap integral relation. Our model automatically optimizes diffractive masks, allowing the structured pump to quantitatively modulate the OAM distribution. The generation of maximally entangled states in different dimensions is demonstrated numerically and experimentally.