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Applied Physics Letters

Optimizing photon-pair generation electronically using a p-i-n diode incorporated in a silicon microring resonator

Marc Savanier, Ranjeet Kumar, Shayan Mookherjea

Published Sep 28, 2015• 60 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Silicon photonic microchips may be useful for compact, inexpensive, room-temperature optically pumped photon-pair sources, which unlike conventional photon-pair generators based on crystals or optical fibers, can be manufactured using CMOS-compatible processes on silicon wafers. It has been shown that photon pairs can be created in simple structures such as microring resonators at a rate of a few hundred kilohertz using less than a milliwatt of optical pump power, based on the process of spontaneous four-wave mixing. To create a practical photon-pair source, however, also requires some way of monitoring the device and aligning the pump wavelength when the temperature varies, since silicon resonators are highly sensitive to temperature. In fact, monitoring photodiodes are standard components in classical laser diodes, but the incorporation of germanium or InGaAs photodiodes would raise the cost and fabrication complexity. Here, we present a simple and effective all-electronic technique for finding the optimum operating point for the microring used to generate photon pairs, based on measuring the reverse-biased current in a silicon p-i-n junction diode fabricated across the waveguide that constitutes the silicon microring. We show that by monitoring the current, and using it to tune the pump laser wavelength, the photon-pair generation properties of the microring can be preserved over a temperature range of more than 30 °C.

DOI
10.1063/1.4932047

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•Jan 1, 2020•0 citations
Silicon photonic microchips may be useful for compact, inexpensive, room-temperature optically pumped photon-pair sources, which unlike conventional photon-pair generators based on crystals or optical fibers, can be manufactured using CMOS-compatible processes on silicon wafers. It has been shown that photon pairs can be created in simple structures such as microring resonators at a rate of a few hundred kilohertz using less than a milliwatt of optical pump power, based on the process of spontaneous four-wave mixing. To create a practical photon-pair source, however, also requires some way of monitoring the device and aligning the pump wavelength when the temperature varies, since silicon resonators are highly sensitive to temperature. In fact, monitoring photodiodes are standard components in classical laser diodes, but the incorporation of germanium or InGaAs photodiodes would raise the cost and fabrication complexity. Here, we present a simple and effective all-electronic technique for finding the optimum operating point for the microring used to generate photon pairs, based on measuring the reverse-biased current in a silicon p-i-n junction diode fabricated across the waveguide that constitutes the silicon microring. We show that by monitoring the current, and using it to tune the pump laser wavelength, the photon-pair generation properties of the microring can be preserved over a temperature range of more than 30 °C.
Generation of photon pairs from compact, manufacturable, and inexpensive silicon (Si) photonic devices at room temperature may help develop practical applications of quantum photonics. An important characteristic of photon-pair generation is the two-photon joint spectral intensity, which describes the frequency correlations of the photon pair. Recent attempts to generate a factorizable photon-pair state suitable for heralding have used short optical pump pulses from mode-locked lasers, which are much more expensive and bigger table-top or rack-sized instruments compared with the Si microchip used for generating photon pairs, and thus dominate the cost and inhibit the miniaturization of the source. Here, we generate photon pairs from an Si microring resonator by using an electronic step-recovery diode to drive an electro-optic modulator which carves the pump light from a continuous-wave laser diode into pulses of the appropriate width, thus potentially eliminating the need for optical mode-locked lasers.
Microring resonators made from silicon are becoming a popular microscale device format for generating photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths at room temperature. In compact devices with a footprint less than 5 × 10(-4) mm2, we demonstrate pair generation using only a few microwatts of average pump power. We discuss the role played by important parameters such as the loss, group-velocity dispersion and the ring-waveguide coupling coefficient in finding the optimum operating point for silicon microring pair generation. Silicon photonics can be fabricated using deep ultraviolet lithography wafer-scale fabrication processes, which is scalable and cost-effective. Such small devices and low pump power requirements, and the side-coupled waveguide geometry which uses an integrated waveguide, could be beneficial for future scaled-up architectures where many pair-generation devices are required on the same chip.
We report photon pairs and heralded single photons generated at 1310 nm wavelengths using silicon photonics technology, demonstrating that comparable performance could be achieved when a silicon microring resonator was pumped either by a desktop laser instrument or by an electrically injected, room-temperature hybrid silicon laser. Measurements showed that 130 kilo-coincidence-counts per second pair rates could be generated, with coincidences-to-accidentals ratio approximately 100 at about 0.34 mW optical pump power and anti-bunching upon heralding with second-order intensity correlation g(2)(0) = 0.06 at about 0.9 mW optical pump power. These results suggest that hybrid silicon lasers, which are ultra-compact and wafer-scale manufacturable, could be used in place of packaged, stand-alone lasers for generating photon pairs at data communication wavelengths and enable large-scale, cost-effective manufacturing of integrated sources for quantum communications and computing.
Photon-pair generation at telecommunication wavelengths using high-quality silicon microring resonators is an active area of research. Here, we report on significant progress towards the ultimate goal of an integrated silicon microchip for bright generation of photon pairs with multiple stages of tunable optical filtering on the same chip. A high pair generation brightness of 6.5×1010 pairs/s/mW2/nm is achieved. The resonance of the high-Q silicon microring resonator can be monitored using a high dynamic range readout of a photocurrent in an all-silicon p-i-n diode fabricated across the waveguide cross-section, which is used to align the ring resonance to the passbands or stopbands of the filters.
Silicon photonics has drawn a lot of attention over the last decades, mainly in telecom-related application fields where the nonlinear optical properties of silicon are ignored or minimized. However, silicon’s high χ(3) Kerr optical nonlinearity in sub-micron-scale high-confinement waveguides can enable significant improvements in traditional nonlinear devices, such as for wavelength conversion, and also enable some device applications in quantum optics or for quantum key distribution. In order to establish the viability of silicon photonics in practical applications, some big challenges are to improve the optical performance (e.g., optimize nonlinearity or minimize loss) and integration of optics with microelectronics. In this context, we discuss how electronic PIN diodes improve the performance of wavelength conversion in a microring resonator based four-wave mixing device, which achieves a continuous-wave four-wave mixing conversion efficiency of −21.3 dB at 100 mW pump power, with enough bandwidth for the wavelength conversion of a 10 Gbps signal. In the regime of quantum optics, we describe a coupled microring device that can serve as a tunable source of entangled photon pairs at telecommunications wavelengths, operating at room temperature with a low pump power requirement. By controlling either the optical pump wavelength, or the chip temperature, we show that the output bi-photon spectrum can be varied, with implications on the degree of frequency correlation of the generated quantum state.
Compact, efficient, high-quality and scalable non-classical photon sources are one of the most critical building blocks for quantum information processing and communications. Photon pair generation via spontaneous four wave mixing is being recognized as an attractive platform for quantum optics which is compatible with the rapidly-maturing classical integrated photonics technology using silicon wafers, which is adopted in industry for its low cost, high performance and scalability. Traditionally, the photon pairs generated from silicon photonic devices, however, have not compared favorably with traditional nonlinear crystals in terms of overall rate, quality and efficiency. This dissertation discusses the factors that affect the quality and efficiency of photon pair generation in silicon integrated photonic microrings, together with their design and characterization. Furthermore, we show how the microrings can be integrated with other photonic devices on the silicon-on-insulator platform, and using proof-of-concept experiments, discuss the feasibility of using these photon-pair sources with technology that is already present in, or will soon be present in, practical fiber-optic networks, such as integrated lasers and modulated classical data streams.