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arXiv:1704.03769 · New Journal of Physics

Toolbox for the design of LiNbO3-based passive and active integrated quantum circuits

Polina R. Sharapova, Kai-Hong Luo, H Herrmann, Matthias Reichelt, T. Meier, Christine Silberhorn

Published Oct 2, 2017• 61 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present and discuss perspectives of current developments on advanced quantum optical circuits monolithically integrated in the lithium niobate platform. A set of basic components comprising photon pair sources based on parametric down conversion (PDC), passive routing elements and active electro-optically controllable switches and polarisation converters are building blocks of a toolbox which is the basis for a broad range of diverse quantum circuits. We review the state-of-the-art of these components and provide models that properly describe their performance in quantum circuits. As an example for applications of these models we discuss design issues for a circuit providing on-chip two-photon interference. The circuit comprises a PDC section for photon pair generation followed by an actively controllable modified mach–Zehnder structure for observing Hong–Ou–Mandel interference. The performance of such a chip is simulated theoretically by taking even imperfections of the properties of the individual components into account.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/aa9033

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We present and discuss perspectives of current developments on advanced quantum optical circuits monolithically integrated in the lithium niobate platform. A set of basic components comprising photon pair sources based on parametric down conversion (PDC), passive routing elements and active electro-optically controllable switches and polarisation converters are building blocks of a toolbox which is the basis for a broad range of diverse quantum circuits. We review the state-of-the-art of these components and provide models that properly describe their performance in quantum circuits. As an example for applications of these models we discuss design issues for a circuit providing on-chip two-photon interference. The circuit comprises a PDC section for photon pair generation followed by an actively controllable modified mach–Zehnder structure for observing Hong–Ou–Mandel interference. The performance of such a chip is simulated theoretically by taking even imperfections of the properties of the individual components into account.
Quantum photonics has advanced rapidly and become a leading approach for developing a broad range of quantum technologies, including quantum communications, quantum information processing, quantum computing, and quantum sensing. Besides, the emerging photonic integrated circuits (PIC) technology has been widely used to implement versatile optical elements advantageous for different quantum applications. For example, PIC-based devices have functioned as building blocks, such as photonic qubit sources, linear optical circuits, modulators, and even single-photon detectors, for realizing highly integrated, large-scale quantum computing schemes. In such a powerful quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPIC) scheme, the creation, manipulation, and testing of quantum entanglement states from the generated qubits via a reconfigurable photonic circuitry are essential. Though the state-of-the-art PIC technology is established based on Si photonics due to its widely mature nanophotonic circuit (waveguide) fabrication technology supported by the existing immense semiconductor industry, Si-based PIC has limitations in implementing efficient and fast active elements that usually demand a quadratic nonlinearity. Lithium niobate (LN), renowned as “the silicon of photonics”, has long been a popular material widely used in integrated-optical and nonlinear-optical applications. A great variety of passive and active photonic elements have been realized in the LN platform. Recently, a novel material based on high-quality single-crystalline films of LN, known as thin-film LN on insulator (LNOI), has been developed and has soon drawn enormous attention for its greatly promising ability to realize nanoscale PIC/QPIC in this iconic optical material platform. In this presentation, we report our recent studies on several key LN PIC building blocks for developing novel quantum photonic sources and circuits, including highly integrated photonic-circuit periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) chips for photon-pair generation and manipulation, for high-dimensional frequency-entangled qudit production, for time-frequency grid-state generation, for continuous-variable squeezed vacuum state generation, and their potential applications to quantum computing/communication/sensing technology. Besides, a PP-LNOI electro-optic (EO) polarization mode converter (PMC) useful for demonstrating fast control of quantum polarization states and other LNOI circuit elements as QPIC building blocks will also be presented.
Abstract Programmable interferometric circuits are at the heart of integrated quantum photonic processors. While the lithium niobate-on-insulator platform has the potential to advance integrated quantum photonics due to its strong nonlinearity and tight mode confinement, the demonstration of reconfigurable two-photon interference has not yet been achieved. Here, we design, fabricate and characterize the building block of such interferometric networks in the form of a 2 × 2 Mach–Zehnder Interferometer. We use a thermo-optic phase shifter to achieve stable performance with a power consumption of P π = 44.4 mW and sub-microsecond switching times. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our device for quantum applications by measuring single-photon routing with up to 34 dB extinction ratio. We show Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with fully tunable visibilities reaching a maximum value of 97.4 ± 1.0 % . As part of large scale quantum photonic circuits, this building block will facilitate reconfigurable and tunable photonic processing units integrated alongside non-classical light sources.
A consequent tendency toward high-performance quantum information processing is to develop the fully integrated photonic chip. Here, we report the on-chip generation and manipulation of entangled photons based on reconfigurable lithium-niobate waveguide circuits. By introducing a periodically poled structure into the waveguide circuits, two individual photon-pair sources with a controllable electro-optic phase shift are produced within a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, resulting in a deterministically separated identical photon pair. The state is characterized by 92.9±0.9% visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. The photon flux reaches ∼1.4×10(7) pairs nm-1 mW-1. The whole chip is designed to contain nine similar units to produce identical photon pairs spanning the telecom C and L band by the flexible engineering of nonlinearity. Our work presents a scenario for on-chip engineering of different photon sources and paves the way to fully integrated quantum technologies.
We report on a unique photonic quantum source chip highly integrating four-stage photonic elements in a lithium niobate (LN) waveguide circuit platform, where an aperiodically poled LN (APPLN) electro-optic (EO) polarization mode converter (PMC) is sandwiched between two identical type-0 PPLN spontaneous parametric down-converters (SPDCs), followed by an EO phase controller (PC). These core nonlinear optic and EO building blocks on the chip are systematically characterized stage by stage to show its high performance as an integrated quantum source. The APPLN EO PMC, optimally constructed by a genetic algorithm, is characterized to have a broad bandwidth (>13 nm), benefiting an efficient control of broadband type-0 SPDC photon pairs featuring a short correlation time. We demonstrate an efficient conversion of the |VV› photon-pair state generated from the first PPLN SPDC stage to the |HH› state through the APPLN EO PMC stage over its operating bandwidth, a broadband or broadly tunable polarization-entangled state can thus be possibly produced via the superposition of the |VV› state generated from the other PPLN SPDC on the third stage of the chip. Such a state can be further manipulated into two of the Bell states if the relative phases between the two polarization states can be properly modulated through the EO PC on the fourth stage of the chip. Such a multifunction integrated quantum photonic source chip can be of high value to developing a compact, efficient, and high-speed quantum information processor.
We report on the theoretical design and simulation of a photonic quantum circuit that operates as a single-photon, two-qubit swap gate. In this approach, the circuit is implemented in Titanium indiffused LiNbO3 channel waveguides, and polarization and spatial encoding are utilized to realize the qubits. A set of basic components comprising a dual periodically poled waveguide for two simultaneous Type-0 and Type-I non-linear interactions, as well as the passive routing and active electro-optically controllable devices, are the main building blocks in this circuit. Simulations are carried out by making use of the numerical beam propagation method incorporated within RSoft program package.