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arXiv:2108.01031 · APL Photonics

A silicon source of heralded single photons at 2 μm

Stefano Signorini, Matteo Sanna, Sara Piccione, Mher Ghulinyan, Peter Tidemand‐Lichtenberg, Christian Pedersen, Lorenzo Pavesi

Published Dec 1, 2021• 21 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1063/5.0063393

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•Jan 15, 2024•1 citation
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 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.
Single photon sources by heralding time correlated photons are described. By intermodal four wave mixing (FWM) in a silicon photon circuit, we generate a herald photon at 1260 nm and the heralded one beyond 2 um, with a coincidence to accidental ratio larger than 50 and a single photon purity of 0.75. The discrete band intermodal phase matching does not require further filtering to improve the purity of the single photon. Moreover, the intermodal FWM exhibits high controllability of the signal/idler wavelengths, that can be generated far from the Raman and pump noise, with improved noise filtering.
While integrated photonics is a robust platform for quantum information processing, architectures for photonic quantum computing place stringent demands on high quality information carriers. Sources of single photons that are highly indistinguishable and pure, that are either near-deterministic or heralded with high efficiency, and that are suitable for mass-manufacture, have been elusive. Here, we demonstrate on-chip photon sources that simultaneously meet each of these requirements. Our photon sources are fabricated in silicon using mature processes, and exploit a dual-mode pump-delayed excitation scheme to engineer the emission of spectrally pure photon pairs through inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing in low-loss spiralled multi-mode waveguides. We simultaneously measure a spectral purity of 0.9904 ± 0.0006, a mutual indistinguishability of 0.987 ± 0.002, and >90% intrinsic heralding efficiency. We measure on-chip quantum interference with a visibility of 0.96 ± 0.02 between heralded photons from different sources.
We present a pulsed and integrated, highly non-degenerate parametric down-conversion (PDC) source of heralded single photons at telecom wavelengths, paired with heralding photons around 800 nm. The active PDC section is combined with a passive, integrated wavelength division demultiplexer on-chip, which allows for the spatial separation of signal and idler photons with efficiencies of more than 96.5%, as well as with multi-band reflection and anti-reflection coatings which facilitate low incoupling losses and a pump suppression at the output of the device of more than 99%. Our device is capable of preparing single photons with efficiencies of 60% with a coincidences-to-accidentals ratio exceeding 7400. Likewise, it shows practically no significant background noise compared to continuous wave realizations. For low pump powers, we measure a conditioned second-order correlation function of g (2) = 3.8 × 10 −3 , which proves almost pure single-photon generation. In addition, our source can feature a high brightness of 〈 n pulse 〉 = 0.24 generated photon pairs per pump pulse at pump power levels below 100 μ W. The high quality of the pulsed PDC process in conjunction with the integration of highly efficient passive elements makes our device a promising candidate for future quantum networking applications, where an efficient miniaturization plays a crucial role.
Abstract Entanglement plays a vital role in quantum information processing. Owing to its unique material properties, silicon carbide recently emerged as a promising candidate for the scalable implementation of advanced quantum information processing capabilities. To date, however, only entanglement of nuclear spins has been reported in silicon carbide, while an entangled photon source, whether it is based on bulk or chip-scale technologies, remains elusive. Here, we report the demonstration of an entangled photon source in an integrated silicon carbide platform for the first time. Specifically, strongly correlated photon pairs are efficiently generated at the telecom C-band wavelength through implementing spontaneous four-wave mixing in a compact microring resonator in the 4H-silicon-carbide-on-insulator platform. The maximum coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeds 600 at a pump power of 0.17 mW, corresponding to a pair generation rate of 9×10 3 pairs/s. Energy-time entanglement is created and verified for such signal-idler photon pairs, with the two-photon interference fringes exhibiting a visibility larger than 99%. The heralded single-photon properties are also measured, with the heralded g (2) (0)on the order of 10 -3 , demonstrating the SiC platform as a prospective fully integrated, CMOS-compatible single-photon source for quantum applications.