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arXiv:1605.06540 · ACS Photonics

High Visibility Time-Energy Entangled Photons from a Silicon Nanophotonic Chip

Steven D. Rogers, Daniel Mulkey, Xiyuan Lu, Wei C. Jiang, Qiang Lin

Published Oct 4, 2016• 32 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Advances in quantum photonics have shown that chip-scale quantum devices are translating from the realm of basic research to applied technologies. Recent developments in integrated photonic circuits and single photon detectors indicate that the bottleneck for fidelity in quantum photonic processes will ultimately lie with the photon sources. We present and demonstrate a silicon nanophotonic chip capable of emitting telecommunication band photon pairs that exhibit the highest raw degree of time-energy entanglement from a micro/nanoscale source, to date. Biphotons are generated through cavity-enhanced spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator, wherein the nature of the triply resonant generation process leads to a dramatic Purcell enhancement, resulting in highly efficient pair creation rates as well as extreme suppression of the photon noise background. The combination of the excellent photon source and a new phase locking technique allow for the observation of a nearly perfect coincidence visibility of (96.6 ± 1.1)%, without any background subtraction, at a large pair generation rate of (4.40 ± 0.07) × 10 5 pairs/s.

DOI
10.1021/acsphotonics.6b00423

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Advances in quantum photonics have shown that chip-scale quantum devices are translating from the realm of basic research to applied technologies. Recent developments in integrated photonic circuits and single photon detectors indicate that the bottleneck for fidelity in quantum photonic processes will ultimately lie with the photon sources. We present and demonstrate a silicon nanophotonic chip capable of emitting telecommunication band photon pairs that exhibit the highest raw degree of time-energy entanglement from a micro/nanoscale source, to date. Biphotons are generated through cavity-enhanced spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator, wherein the nature of the triply resonant generation process leads to a dramatic Purcell enhancement, resulting in highly efficient pair creation rates as well as extreme suppression of the photon noise background. The combination of the excellent photon source and a new phase locking technique allow for the observation of a nearly perfect coincidence visibility of (96.6 ± 1.1)%, without any background subtraction, at a large pair generation rate of (4.40 ± 0.07) × 10 5 pairs/s.
An integrated source of time-energy entangled photons is demonstrated through resonantly enhanced spontaneous four-wave mixing in a silicon micro-ring resonator. A Franson type set-up is employed to show the quantum interference between photon pairs with a visibility exceeding 90% and a violation of the Bell's inequality by more than 10 standard deviations. The high spectral brightness and the extremely small footprint of our source make it suitable for the development of quantum information protocols integrated on chip.
Silicon quantum photonics promises to take quantum optics to the large scale, where single photons carry the quantum information which can accelerate difficult computational problems, provide perfectly secure communication, or allow high-accuracy measurements. The silicon photonics platform offers miniature, high-yield, and high-performance photonics which are integrable with CMOS electronics and telecommunications-band optics. To date, only non-scalable photon-pair sources, based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in straight silicon waveguides have been shown to interfere [1]. Until now, single-photon experiments in silicon [2] have exclusively used an off-chip apparatus, such as a silica arrayed waveguide grating, to control and manipulate photon frequency. We present a silicon-on-insulator quantum photonic device (Fig. 1a) able to generate and analyse two maximally entangled qubits. We use this device to demonstrate high-visibility quantum interferencebetween resonant SFWM sources (analogous to [1]), phase-stable frequency-selection, and quantum state tomography. We varied the phase  to obtain the fringes shown in Fig. 1b, with a visibility of 96.8%. This high visibility indicates that the two microring sources are substantially identical. We setup the entangled state via the on-chip 17-dB extinction filters, and used quantum state tomography to analyse it (Fig. 1c). We measured a fidelity of 0.8. This is the first time an entangled state of photonic qubits has been both generated and analysed on-chip, and this generation has been done in a way which is scalable to larger photon number. These results represent a new step towards fully silicon-integrated quantum photonics.
Integrated quantum photonics leverages the on-chip generation of nonclassical states of light to realize key functionalities of quantum devices. Typically, the generation of such nonclassical states relies on whispering gallery mode resonators, such as integrated optical micro-rings, which enhance the efficiency of the underlying spontaneous nonlinear processes. While these kinds of resonators excel in maximizing either the temporal confinement or the spatial overlap between different resonant modes, they are usually associated with large mode volumes, imposing an intrinsic limitation on the efficiency and footprint of the device. Here, we engineer a source of time-energy entangled photon pairs based on a silicon photonic crystal cavity, implemented in a fully CMOS-compatible platform. In this device, resonantly enhanced spontaneous four-wave mixing converts pump photon pairs into signal/idler photon pairs under the energy-conserving condition in the telecommunication C-band. The design of the resonator is based on an effective bichromatic confinement potential, allowing it to achieve up to nine close-to-equally spaced modes in frequency, while preserving small mode volumes, and the whole chip, including grating couplers and access waveguides, is fabricated in a single run on a silicon-on-insulator platform. Besides demonstrating efficient photon pair generation, we also implement a Franson-type interference experiment, demonstrating entanglement between signal and idler photons with a Bell inequality violation exceeding five standard deviations. The high generation efficiency combined with the small device footprint in a CMOS-compatible integrated structure opens a pathway toward the implementation of compact quantum light sources in all-silicon photonic platforms.
Integrated quantum photonics relies critically on the purity, scalability, integrability, and flexibility of a photon source to support diverse quantum functionalities on a single chip. Here we report a chip-scale photon-pair source on the silicon-on-insulator platform that utilizes dramatic cavity-enhanced four-wave mixing in a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator. The device is able to produce high-quality photon pairs at different wavelengths with a high spectral brightness of 6.24×10(7) pairs/s/mW(2)/GHz and photon-pair correlation with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio of 1386 ± 278 while pumped with a continuous-wave laser. The superior performance, together with the structural compactness and CMOS compatibility, opens up a great avenue towards quantum silicon photonics with capability of multi-channel parallel information processing for both integrated quantum computing and long-haul quantum communication.
We report an efficient energy-time entangled photon-pair source based on four-wave mixing in a CMOS-compatible silicon photonics ring resonator. Thanks to suitable optimization, the source shows a large spectral brightness of 400 pairs of entangled photons /s/MHz for 500 μW pump power, compatible with standard telecom dense wavelength division multiplexers. We demonstrate high-purity energy-time entanglement, i.e., free of photonic noise, with near perfect raw visibilities (> 98%) between various channel pairs in the telecom C-band. Such a compact source stands as a path towards more complex quantum photonic circuits dedicated to quantum communication systems.