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arXiv:1201.2659 · Applied Physics Letters

Telecommunications-band heralded single photons from a silicon nanophotonic chip

Marcelo Davanço, Jun Rong Ong, Andrea Bahgat Shehata, Alberto Tosi, Imad H. Agha, Solomon Assefa, Fengnian Xia, William M. J. Green, Shayan Mookherjea, Kartik Srinivasan

Published Jun 25, 2012• 162 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We demonstrate room temperature heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The strong modal confinement and slow group velocity provided by a coupled resonator optical waveguide produced a large four-wave-mixing nonlinearity coefficient γeff≈4100 W−1 m−1 at telecommunications wavelengths. Spontaneous four-wave-mixing using a degenerate pump beam at 1549.6 nm created photon pairs at 1529.5 nm and 1570.5 nm with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding 20. A photon correlation measurement of the signal (1529.5 nm) photons heralded by the detection of the idler (1570.5 nm) photons showed antibunching with g(2)(0)=0.19±0.03. The demonstration of a single photon source within a silicon platform holds promise for future integrated quantum photonic circuits.

DOI
10.1063/1.4711253

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We demonstrate room temperature heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The strong modal confinement and slow group velocity provided by a coupled resonator optical waveguide produced a large four-wave-mixing nonlinearity coefficient γeff≈4100 W−1 m−1 at telecommunications wavelengths. Spontaneous four-wave-mixing using a degenerate pump beam at 1549.6 nm created photon pairs at 1529.5 nm and 1570.5 nm with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding 20. A photon correlation measurement of the signal (1529.5 nm) photons heralded by the detection of the idler (1570.5 nm) photons showed antibunching with g(2)(0)=0.19±0.03. The demonstration of a single photon source within a silicon platform holds promise for future integrated quantum photonic circuits.
Mid-infrared integrated quantum photonics is a promising platform for applications in sensing and metrology. However, there are only a few examples of on-chip single-photon sources at these wavelengths. These have limited performances with respect to their C-band counterparts. In this work, we demonstrate a new approach to generate heralded single photons in the mid-infrared on a silicon chip. By using a standard C-band pump, the inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing enables the generation of the herald idler at 1259.7 nm and the heralded signal at 2015 nm. The idler photon is easily detected with a common infrared single-photon detector while the signal photon is upconverted to visible before its detection. In this way, we are able to operate a mid-infrared source without the need for mid-infrared detectors and laser sources. By measuring a heralded g(2) of 0.23 ± 0.08, we demonstrate the single-photon behavior of the source as well as the feasibility of multi-photon coincidence measurements beyond 2 μm with our setup. The source exhibits a high-intrinsic heralding efficiency of (59 ± 5)%, a maximum coincidence to accidental ratio of 40.4 ± 0.9, and a generation probability of 0.70±0.10W−2.
On-chip heralded single photon sources are of key importance in the development of chip-scale devices exploiting the quantum properties of light. Single photon states can be produced as single photons heralded from correlated photon pairs generated through spontaneous four wave mixing. On-chip heralded single photon sources based on spontaneous four wave mixing have been already demonstrated. However, the heralded and herald photons are usually generated with wavelengths very close to the pump one, limiting the pump rejection efficiency and the application to the mid infrared. Moreover, the common sources of heralded photons based on spontaneous four wave mixing require spectral post filtering to achieve high purity, limiting the brightness and the integration of these sources. A solution to these problems can be provided by intermodal four wave mixing. In this work, we demonstrate the generation of photon pairs through intermodal four wave mixing in silicon waveguides, measuring the coincidences between the idler at 1.281 μm and the signal at 1.952 μm. We then discuss the application of intermodal four wave mixing to on-chip heralded single photon sources.
.We experimentally study the generation of correlated pairs of photons through four-wave mixing (FWM) in embedded silicon waveguides. The waveguides, which are designed to exhibit anomalous group-velocity dispersion at wavelengths near 1555 nm, allow phase matched FWM and thus efficient pair-wise generation of non-degenerate signal and idler photons. Photon counting measurements yield a coincidence-to-accidental ratio (CAR) of around 25 for a signal (idler) photon production rate of about 0.05 per pulse. We characterize the variation in CAR as a function of pump power and pump-to-sideband wavelength detuning. These measurements represent a first step towards the development of tools for quantum information processing which are based on CMOS-compatible, silicon-on-insulator technology.
We demonstrate theoretically the direct (filter-free) generation of spectrally uncorrelated photon pairs, and consequently high-purity heralded single photons at telecommunication wavelengths, in SOI (silicon-on-insulator) nanowaveguides via spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM). The inherent strong waveguide dispersion in such high-index contrast structures is employed for discrete-band phase-matching in order to suppress the pair spectral correlations, and to produce photons in the fundamental spatial mode for easy in-out coupling to single-mode optical fibers. Additionally, by optimizing the source parameters like waveguide length, dispersion and pump bandwidth, the group-velocity of generated photons is also engineered to further eliminate spectral correlations. Extensive numerical mode simulations for various waveguide widths are used to design intrinsically pure photon sources via joint spectral amplitude (JSA) engineering. Purity$>9595% is shown to be achievable in a silica-clad SOI waveguide with a cross-section 220 × 600 nm95^{2}fortypicalvaluesoflengthandpumpbandwidth.Thewavelengthoftheseheraldedsinglephotonscanbetunedintherangeof1266–1363nm(for typical values of length and pump bandwidth. The wavelength of these heralded single photons can be tuned in the range of 1266–1363 nm (fortypicalvaluesoflengthandpumpbandwidth.Thewavelengthoftheseheraldedsinglephotonscanbetunedintherangeof1266–1363nm(\sim$O-band) by varying the pump wavelength. Considering the high accuracy provided by silicon nanofabrication techniques, the feasibility of generating single photons across the wavelength range 1333–1425 nm (E-band) and 1437–1510 nm (S-band) for slightly different waveguide widths (625 nm & 650 nm) is also demonstrated. These filter-free integrated photon sources could be important for large-scale linear optical quantum computation (LOQC) and long-distance fiber-optic quantum key distribution (QKD) networks.