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Optics Letters

Upconversion detection near 2 μm at the single photon level

Guo-Liang Shentu, Xiu-Xiu Xia, Qi-Chao Sun, Jason S. Pelc, M. M. Fejer, Qiang Zhang, Jian-Wei Pan

Published Nov 19, 2013• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have demonstrated upconversion detection at the single photon level in the 2 μm spectral window using a pump wavelength near 1550 nm, a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide, and a volume Bragg grating (VBG) to reduce noise. We achieve a system photon detection efficiency of 10%, with a noise count rate of 24,500 counts per second, competitive with other 2 μm single photon detection technologies. This detector has potential applications in environmental gas monitoring, life science, and classical and quantum communication.

DOI
10.1364/ol.38.004985

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We have demonstrated upconversion detection at the single photon level in the 2 μm spectral window using a pump wavelength near 1550 nm, a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide, and a volume Bragg grating (VBG) to reduce noise. We achieve a system photon detection efficiency of 10%, with a noise count rate of 24,500 counts per second, competitive with other 2 μm single photon detection technologies. This detector has potential applications in environmental gas monitoring, life science, and classical and quantum communication.
We have demonstrated upconversion detection at the single photon level in the 2 um spectral window using a pump wavelength near 1550nm, a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide, and a volume Bragg grating (VBG) to reduce noise. We achieve a system photon detection efficiency of 10%, with a noise count rate of 24,500 counts per second, competitive with other 2 um single photon detection technologies. This detector has potential applications in environmental gas monitoring, life science, and classical and quantum communication.
Based on the technique of periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide, up-conversion single-photon detection at 1.064-μm is demonstrated. We have achieved a system photon detection efficiency of 32.5% with a very low noise count rate of 45 counts per second by pumping with a 1.55-μm-band single frequency laser using the long-wavelength pumping technique and exploiting volume Bragg grating as a narrow band filter. Replacing the volume Bragg grating with a combination of adequate dielectric filters, a detection efficiency of up to 38% with a noise count rate of 700 counts per second is achieved, making the overall system stable and practical. The up-conversion single-photon detector operating at 1.064 μm can be a promising robust counter and find usage in many fields.
We demonstrate upconversion-assisted single-photon detection for the 1.55-μm telecommunications band based on a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide pumped by a monolithic PPLN optical parametric oscillator. We achieve an internal conversion efficiency of 86%, which results in an overall system detection efficiency of 37%, with excess noise as low as 10(3) counts s(-1). We measure the dark count rate versus the upconversion pump-signal frequency separation and find the results to be consistent with noise photon generation by spontaneous anti-Stokes Raman scattering. These results enable detailed design guidelines for the development of low-noise quantum frequency conversion systems, which will be an important component of fiber-optic quantum networks.
We demonstrate 1500 nm band single-photon detection with low dark-count noise and a potentially high efficiency, which may allow long distance and high-bit-rate quantum key distribution. By developing frequency upconversion devices based on periodically poled lithium niobate waveguides, which are specifically designed to use a pump wavelength longer than that of communication-band photons, we completely eliminate the dark-count noise caused by parasitic nonlinear processes in the waveguide. We observed an internal conversion efficiency as high as 40% and demonstrated scaling down to the single photon level while maintaining a background dark-count rate of 10(2)s(-1).
We introduce a simple approach for a tunable upconversion detector. This scheme is relevant for both single photon detection or anywhere where low light levels at telecom wavelengths need to be detected with a high degree of temporal resolution or where high count rates are desired. A system combining a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide for the nonlinear wavelength conversion and a low jitter silicon avalanche photodiode is used in conjunction with a tunable pump source. We report more than a tenfold increase in the detectable bandwidth using this tuning scheme.
We demonstrate a two-channel, upconversion detector for counting 1300-nm-wavelength photons. By using two pumps near 1550 nm, photons near 1300 nm are converted to two spectrally distinct channels near 710 nm using sum-frequency generation (SFG) in a periodically poled LiNbO3 (PPLN) waveguide. We used spectral-conversion engineering to design the phase-modulated PPLN waveguide for simultaneous quasi-phasematching of two SFG processes. The two channels exhibit 31% and 25% full-system photon detection efficiency, and very low dark count rates (650 and 550 counts per second at a peak external conversion efficiency of 70%) through filtering using a volume Bragg grating. We investigate applications of the dual-channel upconversion detector as a frequency-shifting beamsplitter, and as a time-to-frequency converter to enable higher-data-rate quantum communications.