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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Counterpropagating Twin Photons in the Telecom Range: a Narrow-Bandwidth Semiconductor Source

S. Ducci, L. Lanco, J.-P. Likforman, X. Marcadet, J. A. W. van Houwelingen, Hugo Zbinden, Giuseppe Leo, V. Berger

Published Jun 1, 2007• 2 citations

Abstract

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.

DOI: 10.1109/cleoe-iqec.2007.4386771

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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.

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