This study deals with photonic crystal fiber designed to have a zero dispersion wavelength, lambda0close to 715 nm. A picosecond titanium-sapphire laser pumps the fibre to produce single mode pair-photons at 583 nm signal and 900 nm idler wavelength. The pairs can be collected and detected with lumped efficiencies through 10 nm interference filters up to 24% in the signal channel and 14% in the idler channel. The brightness required for multiphoton experiments can be reached with only milliwatts of pump power. This paper reports on the progress of a fibre heralded source of 1550 nm single photons relevant for quantum cryptography.
This study deals with photonic crystal fiber designed to have a zero dispersion wavelength, lambda0close to 715 nm. A picosecond titanium-sapphire laser pumps the fibre to produce single mode pair-photons at 583 nm signal and 900 nm idler wavelength. The pairs can be collected and detected with lumped efficiencies through 10 nm interference filters up to 24% in the signal channel and 14% in the idler channel. The brightness required for multiphoton experiments can be reached with only milliwatts of pump power. This paper reports on the progress of a fibre heralded source of 1550 nm single photons relevant for quantum cryptography.
We have developed a source of time-correlated photon pairs based on phase matched four-wave mixing in a photonic crystal fiber designed to have a zero dispersion wavelength, lambda0, close to 715nm. We generate parametric gain by pumping close to lambda0in the normal dispersion regime. By pumping with a pulsed titanium-sapphire (TI-SA) laser tuned to 708 nm we generate pair-photons at 583 nm and 900 nm visible to efficient silicon- based photon counting detectors. We can generate >100000 detected pairs per second (in a single spatial and temoral mode) with a few milli-watts of pump power. Using this source we have been able to show high visibility multi-photon interference, by mixing at a 50:50 beam-splitter, two heralded single photons generated in spatially separated micro-structured fibres. The source brightness meant we were able to measure high rates of four- photon generation and detection.
We demonstrate a picosecond source of correlated photon pairs using a micro-structured fibre with zero dispersion around 715 nm wavelength. The fibre is pumped in the normal dispersion regime at ~708 nm and phase matching is satisfied for widely spaced parametric wavelengths. Here we generate up to 10;7 photon pairs per second in the fibre at wavelengths of 587 nm and 897 nm, while on collecting this light in single-mode-fibre-coupled Silicon avalanche diode photon counting detectors, we detect ~3.2x10;5 coincidences per second at pump power 0.5 mW.
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.
Pure state single photons are at the heart of optical quantum technologies. We have previously reported the generation of photon pairs by four-wave mixing in a single-mode photonic crystal fibre (PCF) and the use of a new birefringent phase matching scheme which results in the generation of narrowband signal photons, around 0.2 nm in bandwidth, and a factorizable photon pair state with no requirement for spectral filtering, leading to increased count rates. Our source is bright, polarized, and tuneable by variable laser wavelength and fibre parameters. Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is observed between photons from two of these sources, a requirement for optical quantum information tasks.
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.
Heralded single photons with wavelength near 1550nm are expected to be an important resource for future quantum communications applications. Such applications often rely on non-classical Hong Ou Mandel interference (HOMI) that is observed between indistinguishable, pure photon states. While high visibility HOMI is routinely achieved for photons from identically prepared sources, here we observe interference between photons from two dissimilar systems. To generate synchronised indistinguishable photons, two photon sources were pumped with a single 1064nm, picosecond-pulsed fibre laser. In one source the laser pulses generated correlated pairs of photons at 810nm and 1550nm through four-wave mixing in photonic crystal fibre (PCF). In the other, the laser was used to generate second harmonic light at 532nm in a bulk crystal, before being launched into a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide. This structure was designed to generate signal and idler photons through parametric down-conversion, matched in wavelength to the fibre based source. Idler photons from both sources were input into a fused-fibre coupler in order to measure the HOMI visibility. HOMI with a net visibility of 70% was demonstrated between photons from the two sources (after accounting for the background due to emission of multiple photons from a single source). A visibility of 80% is anticipated for the current sources after further improvement in the purity of the generated states. This result is the first step towards realising a quantum relay system, in which transmitted qubits produced by low loss, fibre-based photon sources interact with photons produced locally on a chip.