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arXiv:1902.06132 · Physical Review Letters

Emission-Frequency Separated High Quality Single-Photon Sources Enabled by Phonons

M. Cosacchi, F. Ungar, Moritz Cygorek, Alexei Vagov, V. M. Axt

Published Jul 3, 2019• 55 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We demonstrate theoretically that the single-photon purity of photons emitted from a quantum dot exciton prepared by phonon-assisted off-resonant excitation can be significantly higher in a wide range of parameters than that obtained by resonant preparation for otherwise identical conditions. Despite the off-resonant excitation, the brightness stays on a high level. These surprising findings exploit the fact that the phonon-assisted preparation is a two-step process where phonons first lead to a relaxation between laser-dressed states while high exciton occupations are reached only with a delay to the laser pulse maximum by adiabatically undressing the dot states. Due to this delay, possible subsequent processes, in particular multiphoton excitations, appear at a time when the laser pulse is almost gone. The resulting suppression of reexcitation processes increases the single-photon purity. Due to the spectral separation of the signal photons from the laser frequencies this enables the emission of high quality single photons not disturbed by a laser background while taking advantage of the robustness of the phonon assisted scheme.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.123.017403

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Quantum emitters promise to emit exactly one photon when pumped by a laser pulse. However, even in ideal systems, re-excitation during the laser pulse duration causes the consecutive emission of two photons, thus limiting the single-photon purity. Although the probability and characteristics of re-excitation are largely determined by the excitation scheme, until now, only resonant driving has been studied. Here, we demonstrate qualitative differences for phonon-assisted excitation and resolve the distinct temporal and spectral profile of each of the photons. These uncover correlations between the emission time and wavelength, resulting in an asymmetric two-photon spectrum. On a fundamental level, we show that this spectrum provides direct access to the Rabi frequency of an incoherently driven quantum dot. On the application side, we leverage the asymmetry to selectively suppress multiphoton noise, ensuring high single-photon purity regardless of the laser pulse length and thus enhancing implementations across quantum cryptography and quantum computing.
It is demonstrated how the exciton and the biexciton state of a quantum dot can be prepared with high fidelity on a picosecond time scale by driving the dot with a strong laser pulse that is tuned above the exciton resonance for exciton preparation and in resonance with the exciton transition for biexciton preparation. The proposed protocols make use of the phonon-induced relaxation towards photon dressed states in optically driven quantum dots and combine the simplicity of traditional Rabi oscillation schemes with the robustness of adiabatic rapid passage schemes. Our protocols allow for an on-demand, fast, and almost perfect state preparation even at strong carrier-phonon interaction where other schemes fail. In fact, the performance of the presented protocols is shown to be better the stronger the carrier-phonon interaction is.
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We investigate theoretically the temporal behavior of a quantum dot under off-resonant optical excitation targeted at fast acoustic phonon-assisted state preparation. We demonstrate that in a preparation process driven by short laser pulses, three processes can be identified: a dressing of the states during the switch-on of the laser pulse, a subsequent phonon-induced relaxation, and an undressing at the end of the pulse. By analyzing excitation scenarios with different pulse shapes we highlight the decisive impact of an adiabatic undressing on the final state in short-pulse protocols. Furthermore, we show that in exciton-biexciton systems the laser characteristics such as the pulse detuning and the pulse length as well as the biexciton binding energy can be used to select the targeted quantum dot state.
We theoretically demonstrate the phonon-assisted control of the single-photon spectral characteristics such as central frequency and linewidth in a semiconductor quantum dot coupled to a pillar microcavity using a single laser pulse as both excitation and control. We derive the relevant optical Bloch equations from the suitable polaron master equation for taking into account the effects of phonons accurately. We show that with the appropriately chosen parameters of the exciting laser pulse (pump pulse) and cavity, the central frequency and linewidth of the single photon can be controlled simply by controlling the frequency and pulse width of the exciting laser pulse, respectively. Subsequently, we show that these are essentially the phonon-induced processes which ensure that the probability of single-photon emission does not change significantly with the variation of the frequency and pulse width of the exciting laser pulse. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the polarization of the single photon can also be controlled by adjusting the polarization of the pump pulse.