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Laser & Photonics Review

Active demultiplexing of single photons from a solid‐state source (Laser Photonics Rev. 11(3)/2017)

Francesco Lenzini, Ben Haylock, J. C. Loredo, Raphael A. Abrahão, Nor Azwa Zakaria, Sachin Kasture, Isabelle Sagnes, Aristide Lemaître, Hoang‐Phuong Phan, Dzung Viet Dao, P. Senellart, Marcelo Pereira de Almeida, Andrew G. White, Mirko Lobino

Published May 1, 2017• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Single photons from a solid state source are deterministically routed into different output modes by a fully integrated active optical switch network. Using a state-of-the-art single photon source made of a single quantum dot in a micropillar cavity and an innovative integrated optical demultiplexer, this scheme is capable of creating manifold single photon states. Such states are a crucial resource for photonic quantum information applications including linear optics quantum computation and quantum communications. (Picture: Mirko Lobino, Ph.D. et al., article number 1600297, in this issue)

DOI
10.1002/lpor.201770034

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A single photon source is an enabling technology in device-independent quantum communication, quantum simulation, linear optics-based and measurement-based quantum computing. These applications employ many photons and place stringent requirements on the efficiency of single photon creation. The scaling on efficiency is typically an exponential function of the number of photons. Schemes taking full advantage of quantum superposition also depend sensitively on the coherence of the photons, i.e. their indistinguishability. \nThis thesis reports a single-photon source with a high end-to-end efficiency. We employ gated quantum dots in an open, tunable microcavity. The gating provides control of the charge and electrical tuning of the emission frequency, the high-quality material and careful design of the system ensures low noise, and the tunability of the microcavity compensates for the lack of control in quantum dot position and emission frequency. Transmission through the top mirror is the dominant escape route for photons from the microcavity, and this output is well-matched to a single-mode fiber. With this design, we can create a single photon at the output of the final optical fiber on-demand with a probability of 57% and with an average two-photon interference visibility of 97.5%. Coherence persists in trains of thousands of photons with single photon creation at a repetition rate of 1 GHz.

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Focus on Single Photons on Demand

Philippe Grangier, Barry C. Sanders, Jelena Vuckovic A

It is safe to say that, when the concept of the photon was first introduced, the generation of single photons was not being considered. Until the emergence of the ideas and methods of quantum optics, the `single-photon regime' was attained by strongly attenuating a laser beam to ensure that the probability of having more than one photon became negligible. However, such attenuated beams differ from `true' single photons in at least two respects: first, the vacuum probability is much higher than the probability of detecting a photon, so one gets predominantly a `no-photon' regime with occasional detection of a photon; second, the probability of getting two photons is never zero, but essentially follows a Poisson law. Although the weak beam has been useful in quantum optics, the advent of quantum information science has placed stringent demands on optical sources, namely that sources produce single photons either on demand or heralded. 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Focus on Single Photons on Demand Contents Photon statistics characterization of a single-photon source R Alleaume, F Treussart, J-M Courty and J-F Roch Photon statistics of a non-stationary periodically driven single-photon source M Hennrich, T Legero, A Kuhn and G Rempe On the measurement of two-photon single-mode coupling efficiency in parametric down-conversion photon sources S Castelletto, I P Degiovanni, A Migdall and M Ware Single-photon sources based on single molecules in solids W E Moerner Single-photon generation with InAs quantum dots Charles Santori, David Fattal, Jelena Vuckovic, Glenn S Solomon and Yoshihisa Yamamoto Visible single-photon generation from semiconductor quantum dots Thomas Aichele, Valery Zwiller and Oliver Benson Enhanced correlated photon pair emission from a pillar microcavity M Benyoucef, S M Ulrich, P Michler, J Wiersig, F Jahnke and A Forchel Experimental open-air quantum key distribution with a single-photon source R Alleaume, F Treussart, G Messin, Y Dumeige, J-F Roch, A Beveratos, R Brouri-Tualle, J-P Poizat and P Grangier Post-processing with linear optics for improving the quality of single-photon sources Dominic W Berry, Stefan Scheel, Casey R Myers, Barry C Sanders, Peter L Knight and Raymond Laflamme A single-photon source based on a single Ca+ ion Christian Maurer, Christoph Becher, Carlos Russo, Jurgen Eschner and Rainer Blatt A calcium ion in a cavity as a controlled single-photon source M Keller, B Lange, K Hayasaka, W Lange and H Walther Quantum optics with single quantum dot devices Valery Zwiller, Thomas Aichele and Oliver Benson The creation and detection of arbitrary photon number states using cavity QED Benjamin T H Varcoe, Simon Brattke and Herbert Walther Stable single-photon source in the near infrared T Gaebel, I Popa, A Gruber, M Domhan, F Jelezko and J Wrachtrup Colloidal CdSe/ZnS quantum dots as single-photon sources X Brokmann, G Messin, P Desbiolles, E Giacobino, M Dahan and J P Hermier Towards a periodic deterministic source of arbitrary single-photon states Evan Jeffrey, Nicholas A Peters and Paul G Kwiat Fabrication of a superconducting niobium nitride hot electron bolometer for single-photon counting R Romestain, B Delaet, P Renaud-Goud, I Wang, C Jorel, J-C Villegier and J-Ph Poizat High-quality asynchronous heralded single-photon source at telecom wavelength Sylvain Fasel, Olivier Alibart, Sebastien Tanzilli, Pascal Baldi, Alexios Beveratos, Nicolas Gisin and Hugo Zbinden Philippe Grangier, Institut d'Optique Theorique et Appliquee, Orsay, France Barry Sanders, University of Calgary, Canada Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford University, CA, USA

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Semiconductor sources of pure quantum light (Conference Presentation)

P. Senellart

Quantum light is a key resource for the development of quantum-enhanced technologies such as secure communications, quantum networks, distributed quantum computing, metrology, etc. The development of these technologies requires light sources emitting single photons in a pure quantum state as well as efficient photon-photon gates. Such sources and gates can be obtained making use of the single-photon sensitivity of an atomic transition. We study artificial atoms in the form of semiconductor quantum dots to develop building blocks for optical quantum technologies. We use the tools of opto-electronics and nanotechnology to fabricate close to ideal atom-photon interfaces, where a single artificial atom interacts with a single mode of the optical field. We show that cavity quantum electrodynamics allows to largely isolate the artificial atoms from all sources of decoherence such as charge noise and crystal vibrations. We obtain bright solid-state sources of single photons with very high quantum purity, not only in the frequency basis, but for the first time also in the photon number basis. Finally, we have made progresses toward the development of efficient two-photon gates, with devices performing as nonlinear switches at the single-photon level. Some references: High-performances quantum light sources Somaschi et al., Nature Photonics 10, 340 (2016) Grange et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 253602 (2017) Senellart, Solomon and White, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 1026 (2017) J. C. Loredo, C. Anton, et. al, arXiv:1810.05170 Scaling-up optical quantum computing Loredo et al., Optica 3, 433 (2016) Loredo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 130503 (2017) Toward efficient photon-photon gates Giesz et al., Nat. Comm 7, 11986 (2016) De Santis et al, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 663 (2017)

•Oct 18, 2019•0 citations
Single photons from a solid state source are deterministically routed into different output modes by a fully integrated active optical switch network. Using a state-of-the-art single photon source made of a single quantum dot in a micropillar cavity and an innovative integrated optical demultiplexer, this scheme is capable of creating manifold single photon states. Such states are a crucial resource for photonic quantum information applications including linear optics quantum computation and quantum communications. (Picture: Mirko Lobino, Ph.D. et al., article number 1600297, in this issue)
Abstract A scheme for active temporal‐to‐spatial demultiplexing of single photons generated by a solid‐state source is introduced. The scheme scales quasi‐polynomially with photon number, providing a viable technological path for routingnphotons in the one temporal stream from a single emitter tondifferent spatial modes. Active demultiplexing is demonstrated using a state‐of‐the‐art photon source—a quantum‐dot deterministically coupled to a micropillar cavity—and a custom‐built demultiplexer—a network of electro‐optically reconfigurable waveguides monolithically integrated in a lithium niobate chip. The measured demultiplexer performance can enable a six‐photon rate three orders of magnitude higher than the equivalent heralded SPDC source, providing a platform for intermediate quantum computation protocols. image
Temporal-to-spatial mode demultiplexing routes non-simultaneous events of the same spatial mode to distinct output trajectories. This technique has now been widely adopted, because it gives access to higher-number multi-photon states when exploiting solid-state quantum emitters. However, implementations so far have required an always-increasing number of active elements and are therefore rapidly facing resource constraints. Here, we propose and demonstrate a demultiplexing approach that uses only a single active element for routing to, in principle, an arbitrary number of outputs. We employ our device in combination with a high-efficiency single-photon source based on a quantum dot, and measure up to eight demultiplexed highly indistinguishable single photons. We discuss the practical limitations of our approach, and describe in which conditions it can be used to demultiplex, e.g., tens of outputs. Our scheme thus provides a path for the preparation of resource-efficient larger-scale multi-photon sources.
Temporal-to-spatial mode demultiplexing routes non-simultaneous events of the same spatial mode to distinct output trajectories. This technique has now been widely adopted, because it gives access to higher-number multi-photon states when exploiting solid-state quantum emitters. However, implementations so far have required an always-increasing number of active elements and are therefore rapidly facing resource constraints. Here, we propose and demonstrate a demultiplexing approach that uses only a single active element for routing to, in principle, an arbitrary number of outputs. We employ our device in combination with a high-efficiency single-photon source based on a quantum dot, and measure up to eight demultiplexed highly indistinguishable single photons. We discuss the practical limitations of our approach, and describe in which conditions it can be used to demultiplex, e.g., tens of outputs. Our scheme thus provides a path for the preparation of resource-efficient larger-scale multi-photon sources.
A single photon source is an enabling technology in device-independent quantum communication, quantum simulation, linear optics-based and measurement-based quantum computing. These applications employ many photons and place stringent requirements on the efficiency of single photon creation. The scaling on efficiency is typically an exponential function of the number of photons. Schemes taking full advantage of quantum superposition also depend sensitively on the coherence of the photons, i.e. their indistinguishability. \nThis thesis reports a single-photon source with a high end-to-end efficiency. We employ gated quantum dots in an open, tunable microcavity. The gating provides control of the charge and electrical tuning of the emission frequency, the high-quality material and careful design of the system ensures low noise, and the tunability of the microcavity compensates for the lack of control in quantum dot position and emission frequency. Transmission through the top mirror is the dominant escape route for photons from the microcavity, and this output is well-matched to a single-mode fiber. With this design, we can create a single photon at the output of the final optical fiber on-demand with a probability of 57% and with an average two-photon interference visibility of 97.5%. Coherence persists in trains of thousands of photons with single photon creation at a repetition rate of 1 GHz.
It is safe to say that, when the concept of the photon was first introduced, the generation of single photons was not being considered. Until the emergence of the ideas and methods of quantum optics, the `single-photon regime' was attained by strongly attenuating a laser beam to ensure that the probability of having more than one photon became negligible. However, such attenuated beams differ from `true' single photons in at least two respects: first, the vacuum probability is much higher than the probability of detecting a photon, so one gets predominantly a `no-photon' regime with occasional detection of a photon; second, the probability of getting two photons is never zero, but essentially follows a Poisson law. Although the weak beam has been useful in quantum optics, the advent of quantum information science has placed stringent demands on optical sources, namely that sources produce single photons either on demand or heralded. In particular secure quantum cryptography and linear optical quantum computing depend on the availability of such single-photon sources. The combination of strict requirements for single photons, plus new technologies, is driving an exciting research effort into single-photon generation. This Focus Issue recognizes that single-photon sources are rapidly developing and presents research articles covering the spectrum of activity in the field. Significant advances are reported for single-photon and photon-pair sources constructed from quantum dots in pillar microcavities, parametric down converters, falling neutral atoms and trapped ions in cavities, defects in diamond nanocrystals and a single molecule in a solid. In addition to producing single-photon pulses, one article reports on the latest developments regarding the production of photon number states in a microwave cavity. Another article discusses the application of a nitrogen-vacancy-based single-photon source to an experimental demonstration of quantum key distribution in open air. Photodetection performs a critical role in assessing single-photon sources as well as heralding the arrival of a single photon based on detecting a correlated partner, and this issue presents the latest results on single-photon counting with a superconducting niobium nitride hot-electron bolometer. Another article provides a detailed study of how to characterize single-photon sources via intensity noise analyses. Photodetection is also important for post-selection-based processing for non-deterministic quantum information tasks, and this issue presents an analysis of photodetection and post-selection used in another way: enhancing the efficiency of single-photon sources by interferometry, photodetection and post-selection. New Journal of Physics appreciates the rapid pace of development in the area of single photons on demand. This Focus Issue presents the latest developments and also points to a bright future with better photon sources. Focus on Single Photons on Demand Contents Photon statistics characterization of a single-photon source R Alleaume, F Treussart, J-M Courty and J-F Roch Photon statistics of a non-stationary periodically driven single-photon source M Hennrich, T Legero, A Kuhn and G Rempe On the measurement of two-photon single-mode coupling efficiency in parametric down-conversion photon sources S Castelletto, I P Degiovanni, A Migdall and M Ware Single-photon sources based on single molecules in solids W E Moerner Single-photon generation with InAs quantum dots Charles Santori, David Fattal, Jelena Vuckovic, Glenn S Solomon and Yoshihisa Yamamoto Visible single-photon generation from semiconductor quantum dots Thomas Aichele, Valery Zwiller and Oliver Benson Enhanced correlated photon pair emission from a pillar microcavity M Benyoucef, S M Ulrich, P Michler, J Wiersig, F Jahnke and A Forchel Experimental open-air quantum key distribution with a single-photon source R Alleaume, F Treussart, G Messin, Y Dumeige, J-F Roch, A Beveratos, R Brouri-Tualle, J-P Poizat and P Grangier Post-processing with linear optics for improving the quality of single-photon sources Dominic W Berry, Stefan Scheel, Casey R Myers, Barry C Sanders, Peter L Knight and Raymond Laflamme A single-photon source based on a single Ca+ ion Christian Maurer, Christoph Becher, Carlos Russo, Jurgen Eschner and Rainer Blatt A calcium ion in a cavity as a controlled single-photon source M Keller, B Lange, K Hayasaka, W Lange and H Walther Quantum optics with single quantum dot devices Valery Zwiller, Thomas Aichele and Oliver Benson The creation and detection of arbitrary photon number states using cavity QED Benjamin T H Varcoe, Simon Brattke and Herbert Walther Stable single-photon source in the near infrared T Gaebel, I Popa, A Gruber, M Domhan, F Jelezko and J Wrachtrup Colloidal CdSe/ZnS quantum dots as single-photon sources X Brokmann, G Messin, P Desbiolles, E Giacobino, M Dahan and J P Hermier Towards a periodic deterministic source of arbitrary single-photon states Evan Jeffrey, Nicholas A Peters and Paul G Kwiat Fabrication of a superconducting niobium nitride hot electron bolometer for single-photon counting R Romestain, B Delaet, P Renaud-Goud, I Wang, C Jorel, J-C Villegier and J-Ph Poizat High-quality asynchronous heralded single-photon source at telecom wavelength Sylvain Fasel, Olivier Alibart, Sebastien Tanzilli, Pascal Baldi, Alexios Beveratos, Nicolas Gisin and Hugo Zbinden Philippe Grangier, Institut d'Optique Theorique et Appliquee, Orsay, France Barry Sanders, University of Calgary, Canada Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford University, CA, USA
Quantum light is a key resource for the development of quantum-enhanced technologies such as secure communications, quantum networks, distributed quantum computing, metrology, etc. The development of these technologies requires light sources emitting single photons in a pure quantum state as well as efficient photon-photon gates. Such sources and gates can be obtained making use of the single-photon sensitivity of an atomic transition. We study artificial atoms in the form of semiconductor quantum dots to develop building blocks for optical quantum technologies. We use the tools of opto-electronics and nanotechnology to fabricate close to ideal atom-photon interfaces, where a single artificial atom interacts with a single mode of the optical field. We show that cavity quantum electrodynamics allows to largely isolate the artificial atoms from all sources of decoherence such as charge noise and crystal vibrations. We obtain bright solid-state sources of single photons with very high quantum purity, not only in the frequency basis, but for the first time also in the photon number basis. Finally, we have made progresses toward the development of efficient two-photon gates, with devices performing as nonlinear switches at the single-photon level. Some references: High-performances quantum light sources Somaschi et al., Nature Photonics 10, 340 (2016) Grange et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 253602 (2017) Senellart, Solomon and White, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 1026 (2017) J. C. Loredo, C. Anton, et. al, arXiv:1810.05170 Scaling-up optical quantum computing Loredo et al., Optica 3, 433 (2016) Loredo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 130503 (2017) Toward efficient photon-photon gates Giesz et al., Nat. Comm 7, 11986 (2016) De Santis et al, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 663 (2017)