Pure single photon generation from nonlinear processes

Abstract

Summary form only given. Parametric downconversion (PDC) allows the generation of highly coherent, spectrally pure single photons for quantum photonics. In a typical heralded PDC source, the signal photon emerges in a spectrally mixed state due to strong (anti)correlation in the joint spectrum of PDC photon pairs.One method for reducing spectral correlations is spectral filtering, but this compromises the heralding efficiency and the brightness of the source. A more sophisticated method for increasing the heralded photon purity is group-velocity matching, which works by erasing part of the timing information between the pump and PDC photons. What group-velocity matching cannot address, however, are the remaining correlations in the joint spectrum that come from the sinc-shaped phase-matching function (PMF) typical to standard PDC crystals. Further source engineering is therefore required to remove these correlations. Several studies have introduced domain-engineering techniques for shaping the phase matching function (PMF) in periodically poled crystals to improve single photon purities [1-4]. We present a new technique for tailoring crystal nonlinearities which combines the advantages of a deterministic method for domain engineering [4] and an annealing method developed for classical applications in higher-harmonic generation [5]. In our method, we first choose each domain orientation such that the generated field amplitude along the crystal matches the target field amplitude obtained by integrating the desired nonlinearity profile. Using a one-block structure instead of a two-blocks structure (as in [4]) results in a higher flexibility of the algorithm in tracking the target function and yields to more accurate results. We then use an annealing algorithm to slightly vary the width of each domain, further improving the effective PMF. Our technique outperforms its predecessors, particularly for short crystals, leading to high single photon purities, as shown in Fig.1. We experimentally characterise our method through a high-precision measurement of multiphoton interference between two heralded photons generated by two independent sources.We also notice that by considering a complex target field amplitude function it is possible to generalise the algorithm in [5] to any constant domain width (not necessarily equal to the coherence length), leading to a better approximation of the desired phase matching function, especially in the very short crystal regime. Moreover, tracking both the real and imaginary components of the target function allows us to approximate more exotic cases such as chirped nonlinearity profiles. Since scalable quantum photonics will require integrated architectures in which nonlinear processes are typically employed for single-photon generation, it will be interesting to explore new techniques similar to in-fibre Bragg grating structures which might yield quasi-periodic four-wave mixing and apply our algorithm to these new platforms.