Quantum state engineering with twisted photons via adaptive shaping of the pump beam

High-dimensional entanglement is a valuable resource for quantum communication, and photon pairs entangled in orbital angular momentum (OAM) are commonly used for encoding high-dimensional quantum states. However, methods for the preparation of maximally entangled states of arbitrary dimensionality are still lacking, and currently used approaches essentially rely on filtering and entanglement concentration. Here, we experimentally realize a method for the generation of high-dimensional maximally entangled OAM states of photon pairs which does not require any of these procedures. Moreover, the prepared state is restricted to the subspace of the specified dimensionality, thus requiring minimal spatial postselection.