Development of pure single photon source and its application in quantum optics

Valérian Thiel, Alex O. C. Davis, Ke Sun +3 more

Single-photon sources are a fundamental resource in quantum optics and quantum information science. Photons with differing spectral and temporal shapes do not interfere well and inhibit the performance of quantum applications such as linear optics quantum computing, boson sampling, and quantum networks. Indistinguishability and purity of photons emitted from different sources are crucial properties for many quantum applications. The ability to determine the state of single-photon sources therefore provides a means to assess their quality, compare different sources, and provide feedback for source tuning. Here, we propose and demonstrate a single-configuration experimental method enabling complete characterization of the spectral-temporal state of a pulsed single-photon source having both pure and mixed states. The method involves interference of the unknown single-photon source with a reference at a balanced beam splitter followed by frequency-resolved coincidence detection at the outputs. Fourier analysis of the joint-spectral two-photon interference pattern reveals the density matrix of the single-photon source in the frequency basis. We present an experimental realization of this method for pure and mixed state pulsed single-photon sources.

Rowan A. Hoggarth

Jiefei Zhang, Swarnabha Chattaraj, Qi Huang +3 more

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed remarkable progress in harnessing the power of quantum mechanics, on-chip, enabled by the development in epitaxial semiconductor nanoscience with proof-of-principle demonstrations -- many tour-de force -- of quantum functionalities such as entanglement and teleportation amongst photon and matter qubits ---quintessential quantum phenomena that underpin the development of quantum technologies. A basic hindrance to such development however has been the absence of a platform of on-demand single photon sources (SPSs) with adequate spectral characteristics and arranged in spatially regular arrays necessary for their incorporation in surrounding light manipulation units to enable quantum networks. Here we report on the first spatially-ordered, scalable platform of deterministic, bright, spectrally highly uniform, pure, and indistinguishable SPSs. At 19.5K, and without Purcell enhancement, these SPSs exhibit emission purity ~99.2% and two-photon interference (TPI) indistinguishability ~57%. Oscillation behavior of the photon emission indicates that the photons originate from a coherent superposition of two excitonic states, revealing effectively a three-level electronic structure which can be exploited as potential two-frequency qubit generating energy entangled photons for teleportation. Time-dependent two photon interference (Hong-Ou Mandel interferometry) coincidence counts g(2)({\tau}) near {\tau}=0 show effectively zero count which, analyzed using the three-level model, reveals a highly encouraging dephasing time of ~0.58ns at ~20K. Such SPS arrays in a planarized structure open the pathway to creating interconnected quantum networks for application in communication, sensing, computing and more.

John Rarity, Stephen C. Kitson, Paul R. Tapster

Jennifer Ann Hollingsworth

Dalia Ornelas-Huerta, Alexander N. Craddock, Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt +6 more

Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure, and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We simultaneously observe a fully single-mode (spectral, temporal, spatial, and polarization) efficiency up to 0.098(2), a detector-background-subtracted g ( 2 ) = 5.0 ( 1.6 ) × 10 − 4 , and indistinguishability of 0.980(7), at an average photon production rate of 1.18 ( 2 ) × 10 4 s − 1 . All of these make this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency and observed single-mode efficiencies up to 0.18(2) for lower photon rates. Finally, recognizing that many quantum information protocols require a single photon in a fully single mode, we introduce metrics that take into account all degrees of freedom to benchmark the performance of on-demand sources.