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Physical Review Letters

Counterpropagating Twin Photons by Parametric Fluorescence

Alfredo De Rossi, V. Berger

Published Jan 1, 2002• 64 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An original geometry for parametric fluorescence is proposed and analyzed theoretically, in which counterpropagating twin photons are emitted in a thin waveguide. In this original down-conversion process, a dramatic decrease of the spectral signal bandwidth at degeneracy is expected, as compared to usual parametric fluorescence processes. The possibility of using the counterpropagating twin photons for quantum cryptography is emphasized. It is shown that the realization of a fibered semiconductor source of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen photons is possible by this method.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.88.043901

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An original geometry for parametric fluorescence is proposed and analyzed theoretically, in which counterpropagating twin photons are emitted in a thin waveguide. In this original down-conversion process, a dramatic decrease of the spectral signal bandwidth at degeneracy is expected, as compared to usual parametric fluorescence processes. The possibility of using the counterpropagating twin photons for quantum cryptography is emphasized. It is shown that the realization of a fibered semiconductor source of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen photons is possible by this method.
We experimentally demonstrate an integrated semiconductor source of counterpropagating twin photons in the telecom range. A pump beam impinging on top of an AlGaAs waveguide generates parametrically two counterpropagating, orthogonally polarized signal/idler guided modes. A 2 mm long waveguide emits at room temperature one average photon pair per pump pulse, with a spectral linewidth of 0.15 nm. The twin character of the emitted photons is ascertained through a time-correlation measurement. This work opens a route towards new guided-wave semiconductor quantum devices.
We experimentally demonstrate a counterpropagating twin photons source consisting of an AlGaAs multilayer waveguide. In our geometry, a pump beam impinging on top of a waveguide generates parametrically two counter propagating, orthogonally polarized signal/idler guided modes through a type II nonlinear interaction. Two phase-matched processes occur simultaneously in our scheme: in the first one, the photon copropagating with the z component of the pump beam is TM polarized and the counter propagating one is TE polarized. In the second one, the vice versa occurs. The most attractive application of this device is a narrow-bandwidth fibered source of entangled photon pairs, where signal and idler photons are collected at the opposite waveguide facets with low coupling losses.
We report on an integrated source of twin photons at telecom wavelength operating at room temperature, in which a pump beam impinging on top of an AlGaAs waveguide generates two counterpropagating, orthogonally polarized guided modes by parametric fluorescence. This scheme allows an unprecedented flexibility in controlling the quantum properties of the emitted photons, by a simple shaping of the spatial and spectral profiles of the pump. The source versatility permits us to tailor the degree of frequency correlation and the spectrum of the emitted photons.
We have designed and fabricated a set of AlGaAs multilayer waveguides, which can serve as a source of entangled photons at 1.55μm through parametric fluorescence. In our scheme two counterpropagating, orthogonally polarized signal/idler modes are nonlinearly generated by a pump wave impinging on the upper surface of the waveguide. To check the compliance with design specifications on phase-matching wavelength and parametric gain, we have systematically measured effective indices and surface-emitting second-harmonic generation, respectively. This characterization allowed us to single out a nominal sample with optimum performances, which we numerically modeled for counterpropagating parametric fluorescence. We predict a pair generation efficiency ηPF=4×10−13 (signal photons per pump photon). For a 1W (peak), 100ns pump pulse at normal incidence, this corresponds to about 14 photons per dark count with state-of-the-art avalanche photodiodes.