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Journal of Modern Optics

Photonic crystal fibre-based source of heralded single photons with high mode purity and efficiency

Liang Cui, Cheng Guo, Xiaoying Li

Published Nov 1, 2013• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate and characterize a heralded single photon source which is based on the signal and idler photon pairs generated from pulse pumped spontaneous four wave mixing in photonic crystal fibre. The heralded single photons are approximately in a pure temporal mode, achieved by eliminating the frequency correlation of the photon pairs. Since the influence of Raman scattering is negligible and no narrow bandpass filter is employed, the heralding efficiency of the source is up to 85%. When the production rate is 0.002 pair/pulse, the measured second-order intensity correlation function of the heralded single photons is , which is suppressed by a factor of more than 80 relative to the classical Poissonian light limit. In addition, the demonstrated source is pumped by a photonic crystal fibre laser, which makes the source more compact and low-cost.

DOI
10.1080/09500340.2013.844865

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We demonstrate and characterize a heralded single photon source which is based on the signal and idler photon pairs generated from pulse pumped spontaneous four wave mixing in photonic crystal fibre. The heralded single photons are approximately in a pure temporal mode, achieved by eliminating the frequency correlation of the photon pairs. Since the influence of Raman scattering is negligible and no narrow bandpass filter is employed, the heralding efficiency of the source is up to 85%. When the production rate is 0.002 pair/pulse, the measured second-order intensity correlation function of the heralded single photons is , which is suppressed by a factor of more than 80 relative to the classical Poissonian light limit. In addition, the demonstrated source is pumped by a photonic crystal fibre laser, which makes the source more compact and low-cost.
The preparation of single photons in a pure quantum state is a subject of great interest in physics, enabling the control of light at an unprecedented level. The ease with which certain degrees of freedom of photon states, such as polarisation, can be manipulated, along with the inherent resilience of photons to decoherence, makes them well suited for use as qubits. Recent rapid developments in the transmission and processing of quantum information, as well as the likely technological impact of potential real-world applications such as quantum cryptography and quantum computation, mean that the demand for high performance single photon sources is likely to increase in the near future. One approach to producing single photon states, which are known to be in a well-defined spatio-temporal mode without destructively measuring them, is to take advantage of nonlinear optics. Nonlinear processes can be used to realise frequency conversion by generating a single, correlated pair of photons from an intense pump laser source. The detection of one of the photons from a pair can then be used to indicate the presence of the other photon in the pair, a procedure known as heralding. This thesis describes the development of a source of heralded single photons at 1550 nm, generated directly in the core of a photonic crystal fibre (PCF). By taking advantage of low loss fibre components for the required spectral filtering of the generated photon state, a heralding fidelity of 52% was achieved. The source was designed to be used with a picosecond pulsed fibre laser, making it relatively low cost and maintenance free. With 148 mW of average pump power a heralded output photon rate of 6.4 × 104 s-1 was observed, demonstrating the brightness of the source. The purity of the generated single photons was established by measuring non-classical interference, with a visibility of 70%, between the photons output from this source and a source based on a PPLN waveguide. The fabrication of a series of birefringent PCFs for the generation of spectrally pure state photons at 1550 nm is also discussed. These PCFs will be useful for incorporation in the next generation of high performance, fibre-based photon sources.
A one-meter-long high nonlinear photonic crystal fiber is pumped by laser pulse train at room temperature, and the generated correlated idler and signal photons are centred at 830 nm and 1411 nm, respectively. The full widths at half maximum of the broad band filters of the two channel are 15 nm and 35 nm, respectively. The fitting results of single channel photon counts reveal that almost all the photons originate from spontaneous four wave mixing and the influence of Raman scattering is eliminated. When the production rate is 0.0085 photon per pulse, the ratio between coincidence rate and accidental coincidence rate is measured to be 102, which not only confirms the low noise property of the photon pair, but also shows that the photon pair are naturally narrow band, and the collecting efficiency in our experiment is high. Moreover, these high purity photon pairs connect different optical bands, and have potential applications in quantum information technologies.
Starting from the derived expression of the Bogoliubov transformation for a broadband pulsed pump, we theoretically characterize the heralded single-photon source, which is based on the signal and idler photon pairs produced in optical fiber via spontaneous four-wave mixing by a pulsed pump. The second-order intensity correlation function, heralding efficiency, indistinguishability, and brightness of the heralded single photons as a function of source parameters, are analyzed and discussed. The validity of the theoretical analysis and calculations are confirmed by the experimental results. The investigations are useful for optimizing the source parameters and for developing a single-photon source suitable for quantum-information processing.
We experimentally demonstrate a heralded single photon source at 1290 nm by exploiting the spontaneous four wave mixing in a taper-drawn micro/nano-fiber (MNF). Because the frequency detuning between the pump and heralded single photons is ∼58  THz, the contamination by Raman scattering is significantly reduced at room temperature. Since the MNF is naturally connected to standard single mode fibers via fiber tapers, the source would be compatible with the existing fiber networks. When the emission rate of heralded signal photons is about 4.6 kHz, the measured second-order intensity correlation function g(2)(0) is 0.017±0.002, which is suppressed by a factor of more than 55, relative to the classical limit.
Based on the dispersion property of a given photonic crystal fiber (PCF), we study how to directly generate frequency de-correlated photon pairs via pulse pumped spontaneous four wave mixing from both the theoretical and experimental aspects. The numerical investigation shows that to generated the frequency de-correlated photon pairs, the experimental parameters should be properly optimized by balancing the influences of the high order dispersion and the intrinsic sinc oscillation of phase matching function, apart from the satisfaction of specified phase matching condition and the usage of transform limited pump pulses. We also conduct experiment to verify the numerical simulations, and the experimental results qualitatively agree with the calculations. For the filter free case, the experimentally obtained maximum g(2) of the individual signal photons is 1.76 ± 0.02. When this kind of photon pairs is used to realize the heralded single photons, the heralding efficiency can reach 86%.
Single photons are at the heart of optical quantum technologies such as quantum cryptography, quantum computing and quantum metrology. In this paper we report on the creation of photon pairs via four-wave-mixing (FWM) in birefringent photonic crystal fibres (PCF). It has recently been suggested that for thoroughly engineering the phase matching condition of a birefringent PCF, photon pairs can by created in an intrinsically pure state and narrow band. This can be achieved for cross-polarized phase matching, where two pump photons in the slow axis are converted into a pair of photons, polarized in the orthogonal fast axis. The aim is to produce such intrinsically pure and narrow-band photons and hence to achieve high non-classical interference visibility without any requirement for spectral filtering. In order to experimentally test the purity of our heralded single photons we performed a Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment using heralded signal photons generated in separate PCF sources.