Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:1604.00408 · Applied Physics Letters

Generating photon pairs from a silicon microring resonator using an electronic step recovery diode for pump pulse generation

Marc Savanier, Shayan Mookherjea

Published Jun 20, 2016• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Generation of photon pairs from compact, manufacturable, and inexpensive silicon (Si) photonic devices at room temperature may help develop practical applications of quantum photonics. An important characteristic of photon-pair generation is the two-photon joint spectral intensity, which describes the frequency correlations of the photon pair. Recent attempts to generate a factorizable photon-pair state suitable for heralding have used short optical pump pulses from mode-locked lasers, which are much more expensive and bigger table-top or rack-sized instruments compared with the Si microchip used for generating photon pairs, and thus dominate the cost and inhibit the miniaturization of the source. Here, we generate photon pairs from an Si microring resonator by using an electronic step-recovery diode to drive an electro-optic modulator which carves the pump light from a continuous-wave laser diode into pulses of the appropriate width, thus potentially eliminating the need for optical mode-locked lasers.

DOI
10.1063/1.4954261

Related papers

Optimizing photon-pair generation electronically using a p-i-n diode incorporated in a silicon microring resonator

Marc Savanier, Ranjeet Kumar, Shayan Mookherjea

Silicon photonic microchips may be useful for compact, inexpensive, room-temperature optically pumped photon-pair sources, which unlike conventional photon-pair generators based on crystals or optical fibers, can be manufactured using CMOS-compatible processes on silicon wafers. It has been shown that photon pairs can be created in simple structures such as microring resonators at a rate of a few hundred kilohertz using less than a milliwatt of optical pump power, based on the process of spontaneous four-wave mixing. To create a practical photon-pair source, however, also requires some way of monitoring the device and aligning the pump wavelength when the temperature varies, since silicon resonators are highly sensitive to temperature. In fact, monitoring photodiodes are standard components in classical laser diodes, but the incorporation of germanium or InGaAs photodiodes would raise the cost and fabrication complexity. Here, we present a simple and effective all-electronic technique for finding the optimum operating point for the microring used to generate photon pairs, based on measuring the reverse-biased current in a silicon p-i-n junction diode fabricated across the waveguide that constitutes the silicon microring. We show that by monitoring the current, and using it to tune the pump laser wavelength, the photon-pair generation properties of the microring can be preserved over a temperature range of more than 30 °C.

Applied Physics Letters•Sep 28, 2015•60 citations

Photon pair generation using a silicon photonic hybrid laser

Xiaoxi Wang, Chaoxuan Ma, Ranjeet Kumar +4 more

We report photon pairs and heralded single photons generated at 1310 nm wavelengths using silicon photonics technology, demonstrating that comparable performance could be achieved when a silicon microring resonator was pumped either by a desktop laser instrument or by an electrically injected, room-temperature hybrid silicon laser. Measurements showed that 130 kilo-coincidence-counts per second pair rates could be generated, with coincidences-to-accidentals ratio approximately 100 at about 0.34 mW optical pump power and anti-bunching upon heralding with second-order intensity correlation g(2)(0) = 0.06 at about 0.9 mW optical pump power. These results suggest that hybrid silicon lasers, which are ultra-compact and wafer-scale manufacturable, could be used in place of packaged, stand-alone lasers for generating photon pairs at data communication wavelengths and enable large-scale, cost-effective manufacturing of integrated sources for quantum communications and computing.

APL Photonics•Aug 27, 2018•12 citations

Enhanced wavelength conversion and photon pair generation using slow light effects and electronic carrier sweepout in silicon photonics devices

Marc Savanier, Ranjeet Kumar, Shayan Mookherjea

Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ(3) Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.

Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE•Mar 10, 2015•0 citations

Photon pair generation from compact silicon microring resonators using microwatt-level pump powers

Marc Savanier, Ranjeet Kumar, Shayan Mookherjea

Microring resonators made from silicon are becoming a popular microscale device format for generating photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths at room temperature. In compact devices with a footprint less than 5 × 10(-4) mm2, we demonstrate pair generation using only a few microwatts of average pump power. We discuss the role played by important parameters such as the loss, group-velocity dispersion and the ring-waveguide coupling coefficient in finding the optimum operating point for silicon microring pair generation. Silicon photonics can be fabricated using deep ultraviolet lithography wafer-scale fabrication processes, which is scalable and cost-effective. Such small devices and low pump power requirements, and the side-coupled waveguide geometry which uses an integrated waveguide, could be beneficial for future scaled-up architectures where many pair-generation devices are required on the same chip.

arXiv:1511.03359•Optics Express•Feb 9, 2016•74 citations

Engineering spectrally unentangled photon pairs from nonlinear microring resonators by pump manipulation

J. B. Christensen, J. G. Koefoed, Karsten K. Rottwitt +1 more

The future of integrated quantum photonics relies heavily on the ability to engineer refined methods for preparing the quantum states needed to implement various quantum protocols. An important example of such states is quantum-correlated photon pairs, which can be efficiently generated using spontaneous nonlinear processes in integrated microring-resonator structures. In this work, we propose a method for generating spectrally unentangled photon pairs from a standard microring resonator. The method utilizes interference between a primary and a delayed secondary pump pulse to effectively increase the pump spectral width inside the cavity. This enables on-chip generation of heralded single photons with state purities in excess of 99% without spectral filtering.

arXiv:1711.02401•Optics Letters•Feb 12, 2018•46 citations

On chip source of photon pairs with integrated pump filtering and signal/idler demultiplexing

Nicholas C. Harris, Davide Grassani, Angelica Simbula +7 more

Considerable research work is being devoted to the integration of quantum optical components on a silicon chip [1]. Many results have been achieved on the generation of quantum states of light in silicon photonic devices, but all the sources demonstrated so far need off-chip filtering stages to clean the generated photons before detection. This necessity for off-chip components hinders usability in a completely integrated platform. In this work [2] we demonstrate for the first time on-chip generation of photon pairs via a silicon microring resonator fully integrated with spectral filters for the pump on the same chip. The sample, shown in Fig. 1 a, is a reconfigurable silicon photonic integrated circuit based on Bragg reflectors and tunable ring resonators. The combination of these devices results in pump rejection by more than 95 dB in a single chip, reducing the pump intensity to less than the flux of the photon pairs generated by spontaneous four wave mixing (Fig 1 b).

Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics•Jan 1, 2015•0 citations
Generation of photon pairs from compact, manufacturable, and inexpensive silicon (Si) photonic devices at room temperature may help develop practical applications of quantum photonics. An important characteristic of photon-pair generation is the two-photon joint spectral intensity, which describes the frequency correlations of the photon pair. Recent attempts to generate a factorizable photon-pair state suitable for heralding have used short optical pump pulses from mode-locked lasers, which are much more expensive and bigger table-top or rack-sized instruments compared with the Si microchip used for generating photon pairs, and thus dominate the cost and inhibit the miniaturization of the source. Here, we generate photon pairs from an Si microring resonator by using an electronic step-recovery diode to drive an electro-optic modulator which carves the pump light from a continuous-wave laser diode into pulses of the appropriate width, thus potentially eliminating the need for optical mode-locked lasers.
Silicon photonic microchips may be useful for compact, inexpensive, room-temperature optically pumped photon-pair sources, which unlike conventional photon-pair generators based on crystals or optical fibers, can be manufactured using CMOS-compatible processes on silicon wafers. It has been shown that photon pairs can be created in simple structures such as microring resonators at a rate of a few hundred kilohertz using less than a milliwatt of optical pump power, based on the process of spontaneous four-wave mixing. To create a practical photon-pair source, however, also requires some way of monitoring the device and aligning the pump wavelength when the temperature varies, since silicon resonators are highly sensitive to temperature. In fact, monitoring photodiodes are standard components in classical laser diodes, but the incorporation of germanium or InGaAs photodiodes would raise the cost and fabrication complexity. Here, we present a simple and effective all-electronic technique for finding the optimum operating point for the microring used to generate photon pairs, based on measuring the reverse-biased current in a silicon p-i-n junction diode fabricated across the waveguide that constitutes the silicon microring. We show that by monitoring the current, and using it to tune the pump laser wavelength, the photon-pair generation properties of the microring can be preserved over a temperature range of more than 30 °C.
We report photon pairs and heralded single photons generated at 1310 nm wavelengths using silicon photonics technology, demonstrating that comparable performance could be achieved when a silicon microring resonator was pumped either by a desktop laser instrument or by an electrically injected, room-temperature hybrid silicon laser. Measurements showed that 130 kilo-coincidence-counts per second pair rates could be generated, with coincidences-to-accidentals ratio approximately 100 at about 0.34 mW optical pump power and anti-bunching upon heralding with second-order intensity correlation g(2)(0) = 0.06 at about 0.9 mW optical pump power. These results suggest that hybrid silicon lasers, which are ultra-compact and wafer-scale manufacturable, could be used in place of packaged, stand-alone lasers for generating photon pairs at data communication wavelengths and enable large-scale, cost-effective manufacturing of integrated sources for quantum communications and computing.
Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ(3) Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.
Microring resonators made from silicon are becoming a popular microscale device format for generating photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths at room temperature. In compact devices with a footprint less than 5 × 10(-4) mm2, we demonstrate pair generation using only a few microwatts of average pump power. We discuss the role played by important parameters such as the loss, group-velocity dispersion and the ring-waveguide coupling coefficient in finding the optimum operating point for silicon microring pair generation. Silicon photonics can be fabricated using deep ultraviolet lithography wafer-scale fabrication processes, which is scalable and cost-effective. Such small devices and low pump power requirements, and the side-coupled waveguide geometry which uses an integrated waveguide, could be beneficial for future scaled-up architectures where many pair-generation devices are required on the same chip.
The future of integrated quantum photonics relies heavily on the ability to engineer refined methods for preparing the quantum states needed to implement various quantum protocols. An important example of such states is quantum-correlated photon pairs, which can be efficiently generated using spontaneous nonlinear processes in integrated microring-resonator structures. In this work, we propose a method for generating spectrally unentangled photon pairs from a standard microring resonator. The method utilizes interference between a primary and a delayed secondary pump pulse to effectively increase the pump spectral width inside the cavity. This enables on-chip generation of heralded single photons with state purities in excess of 99% without spectral filtering.
Considerable research work is being devoted to the integration of quantum optical components on a silicon chip [1]. Many results have been achieved on the generation of quantum states of light in silicon photonic devices, but all the sources demonstrated so far need off-chip filtering stages to clean the generated photons before detection. This necessity for off-chip components hinders usability in a completely integrated platform. In this work [2] we demonstrate for the first time on-chip generation of photon pairs via a silicon microring resonator fully integrated with spectral filters for the pump on the same chip. The sample, shown in Fig. 1 a, is a reconfigurable silicon photonic integrated circuit based on Bragg reflectors and tunable ring resonators. The combination of these devices results in pump rejection by more than 95 dB in a single chip, reducing the pump intensity to less than the flux of the photon pairs generated by spontaneous four wave mixing (Fig 1 b).