Continuous-variable entanglement of phase-locked light beams

We explore in detail the possibility of intracavity generation of continuous-variable (CV) entangled states of light beams under mode phase-locked conditions. We show that such quantum states can be generated in a self-phase-locked nondegenerate optical parametric oscillator (NOPO) based on type II phase-matched down-conversion combined with a linear mixer of two orthogonally polarized modes of the subharmonics in a cavity. A quantum theory of this device, recently realized in the experiment, is developed for both subthreshold and above-threshold operational regimes. We show that the system providing high-level phase coherence between two generated modes, unlike the ordinary NOPO, also exhibits different types of quantum correlations between photon numbers and phases of these modes. We quantify the CV entanglement as two-mode squeezing and show that the maximal degree of the integral two-mode squeezing (which is $50\%$ relative to the level of vacuum fluctuations) is achieved at the pump field intensity close to the generation threshold of a self-phase-locked NOPO, provided that the constant of linear coupling between the two polarizations is much less than the mode detunings. The peculiarities of CV entanglement for the case of unitary, nondissipative dynamics of the system under consideration are also cleared up.