Integrated quantum photonic chips are promising for scalable, photonic based quantum information processing. Although on-chip quantum photon sources and single photon detectors have been demostrated separately, the full integration of these components on single chip is hindered by the background photons from the strong classical pump light. Here we design and fabricate an on-chip long-pass filter which can provide 70 dB attenuation for visible light near 775 nm with less than 3 dB insertion loss for light in the telecom C-band near 1550 nm. The adiabatic design makes this device broadband and robust against fabrication errors as well as working conditions. Combined with the previously demonstrated non-classical on-chip source based on spontaneous parametric down conversion on the same material system, this platform could enable 100 dB suppression of pump light and holds promise in realizing fully integrated quantum photonic chips where the sources, filters and detectors are monolithically integrated.
Integrated quantum photonic chips are promising for scalable, photonic based quantum information processing. Although on-chip quantum photon sources and single photon detectors have been demostrated separately, the full integration of these components on single chip is hindered by the background photons from the strong classical pump light. Here we design and fabricate an on-chip long-pass filter which can provide 70 dB attenuation for visible light near 775 nm with less than 3 dB insertion loss for light in the telecom C-band near 1550 nm. The adiabatic design makes this device broadband and robust against fabrication errors as well as working conditions. Combined with the previously demonstrated non-classical on-chip source based on spontaneous parametric down conversion on the same material system, this platform could enable 100 dB suppression of pump light and holds promise in realizing fully integrated quantum photonic chips where the sources, filters and detectors are monolithically integrated.
Integrated photonics is an exciting platform for quantum communication, computing, and sensing due to its inherent stability and scalability. However, full monolithic or hybrid photonic quantum technology demonstrations remain limited owing to performance and integration challenges. One of the main challenges is the filtering the high-power classical pump light from the generated photons in spontaneous parametric down-conversion sources. Here, we report what we believe to be a novel optical filtering technique based on silicon ion implantation in silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides. Our approach effectively introduces selective absorption of near-visible light, achieving nearly 100 dB suppression of the pump light at 775 nm. On the contrary, the insertion loss for light in the telecom C-band near 1550 nm is just around 4 dB with a scope of significant reduction. This result paves the way for practical and efficient integration of quantum sources, filters, and detectors on-chip, advancing the field toward scalable quantum photonic systems.
Quantum-photonic chips, which integrate quantum light sources alongside active and passive optical elements, as well as single-photon detectors, show great potential for photonic quantum information processing and quantum technology. Mature semiconductor nanofabrication processes allow for scaling such photonic integrated circuits to on-chip networks of increasing complexity. Second-order nonlinear materials are the method of choice for generating photonic quantum states in the overwhelming majority of linear optic experiments using bulk components, but integration with waveguide circuitry on a nanophotonic chip proved to be challenging. Here, we demonstrate such an on-chip parametric down-conversion source of photon pairs based on second-order nonlinearity in an aluminum-nitride microring resonator. We show the potential of our source for quantum information processing by measuring the high visibility anti-bunching of heralded single photons with nearly ideal state purity. Our down-conversion source yields measured coincidence rates of 80 Hz, which implies MHz generation rates of correlated photon pairs. Low noise performance is demonstrated by measuring high coincidence-to-accidental ratios. The generated photon pairs are spectrally far separated from the pump field, providing great potential for realizing sufficient on-chip filtering and monolithic integration of quantum light sources, waveguide circuits and single-photon detectors. A chip-based source of photon pairs for applications in quantum information processing has been built by a team of scientists in the US. Xiang Guo and co-workers from Yale University built the quantum light source from an aluminum nitride microring resonator. The strong second-order nonlinearity of the aluminum nitride yields efficient parametric down-conversion. This allows 775-nm-wavelength pump photons to be converted into a pair of entangled photons in the telecommunications window of 1550 nm. Tests indicated that the heralded photons generated by the microring source are anti-bunched and have high visibility and a high purity of state, indicating that they are highly suitable for use in quantum optics experiments. In principle, the on-chip source is compatible with megahertz generation rates and large-scale manufacture of integrated optical circuits.
Abstract Integrated photonics has recently become a leading platform for the realization and processing of optical entangled quantum states in compact, robust, and scalable chip formats with applications in long-distance quantum-secured communication, quantum-accelerated information processing, and non-classical metrology. However, the quantum light sources developed so far have relied on external bulky excitation lasers making them impractical, not reproducible prototype devices, hindering scalability and the transfer out of the lab into real-world applications. Here we demonstrate a fully integrated quantum light source, which overcomes these challenges through the combined integration of a laser cavity, a highly efficient tunable noise suppression filter (> 55 dB) exploiting the Vernier effect, and a nonlinear microring for entangled photon pair generation through spontaneous four-wave mixing. The hybrid quantum source employs an electrically-pumped InP gain section and a Si₃N₄ low-loss microring filter system and demonstrates high-performance parameters, i.e., a pair emission over four resonant modes in the telecom band (bandwidth ∼ 1 THz), and a remarkable pair detection rate of ∼ 620 Hz at a high coincidence-to-accidental ratio of ∼80. The source directly creates high-dimensional frequency-bin entangled quantum states (qubits/qudits), verified by quantum interference measurements with visibilities up to 96% (violating Bell-inequality) and by density matrix reconstruction through state tomography showing fidelities of up to 99%. Our approach, leveraging a hybrid photonic platform, enables commercial-viable, low-cost, compact, light-weight, and field-deployable entangled quantum sources, quintessential for practical, out-of-lab applications, e.g., in quantum processors and quantum satellite communications systems.
Integrated quantum photonics can realize and process optical entangled quantum states in highly compact, robust, and scalable chips thereby enabling chip scale implementations of long-distance quantum-secured communication, quantum-accelerated information processing, and non-classical metrology [1]. Notably, all previous on-chip entangled quantum photonic sources have relied on an external laser to excite nonlinear parametric processes, thereby making these systems overall non-reproducible, bulky, impractical, and thus unsuitable for out-of-lab use as well as production at large scale [2]. To date, the major challenge inhibiting a fully on-chip quantum light system is to integrate a stable, tunable laser together with a high rejection filter that eliminates laser sideband noise [3], [4] and a nonlinear parametric source of entangled photons. Fig. 1 A) laser-integrated photonic quantum light source of frequency-bin entangled photon states: an electrically pumped inp gain-section, i.e. A reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (rsoa) providing optical gain, is coupled to a si3n4 chip containing a three microring resonator (r1, r2, and r3) vernier filter and a mach-zehnder interferometer (mzi) with a sagnac loop mirror. B) measurements utilizing single photon detectors allowed to determine an smsr≈ 112 db, and an ase suppression of> 56 db. C) car for respective frequency pairs for an excitation power of 3.9 mw. D) density matrices of two-dimensional (qubit) and three-dimensional (qutrit) frequency-bin entangled states reconstructed via quantum state tomography (qst).
The capability of realizing quantum photonics implementations on-chip will have a strong impact on several aspects of quantum computation and information processing. The implementation of large scale integrated quantum photonic technologies requires on-chip reconfigurable waveguide circuits as well as single-photon sources and detectors. Many successes have been made in recent years to demonstrate complex quantum circuits in many material platforms. Among all these platforms, the Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) platform is outstanding as it is well developed for classical applications and therefore deploys a high component density, mature fabrication techniques and compatibility with the telecom regime and the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. However, the lack of on-demand non-classical light sources, directly incorporated in silicon chips, forces the use of nonlinear processes to generate non-classical light states: the probabilistic nature of the emission process sets a limit in the maximally achievable experimental complexity. The use of on-demand sources will have a strong impact on the device’s scalability.
Considerable research work is being devoted to the integration of quantum optical components on a silicon chip [1]. Many results have been achieved on the generation of quantum states of light in silicon photonic devices, but all the sources demonstrated so far need off-chip filtering stages to clean the generated photons before detection. This necessity for off-chip components hinders usability in a completely integrated platform. In this work [2] we demonstrate for the first time on-chip generation of photon pairs via a silicon microring resonator fully integrated with spectral filters for the pump on the same chip. The sample, shown in Fig. 1 a, is a reconfigurable silicon photonic integrated circuit based on Bragg reflectors and tunable ring resonators. The combination of these devices results in pump rejection by more than 95 dB in a single chip, reducing the pump intensity to less than the flux of the photon pairs generated by spontaneous four wave mixing (Fig 1 b).