Strong Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement from a single squeezed light source

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entanglement is a criterion that is more demanding than just certifying entanglement. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the low-resource generation of bipartite continuous-variable entanglement, as realized by mixing a squeezed mode with a vacuum mode at a balanced beam splitter, i.e., the generation of so-called vacuum-class entanglement. We find that in order to observe EPR entanglement the total optical loss must be smaller than $33.3$ $%$. However, arbitrarily strong EPR entanglement is generally possible with this scheme. We realize continuous-wave squeezed light at $1550$ nm with up to $9.9$ dB of nonclassical noise reduction, which is the highest value at a telecom wavelength so far. Using two phase-controlled balanced homodyne detectors we observe an EPR covariance product of $0.502\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.006<1$, where $1$ is the critical value. We discuss the feasibility of strong Gaussian entanglement and its application for quantum key distribution in a short-distance fiber network.