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Quantum Photonic Devices

Are on-chip heralded single photon sources possible by intermodal four wave mixing in silicon waveguides?

Stefano Signorini, Sara Piccione, Mher Ghulinyan, Georg Pucker, Lorenzo Pavesi

Published Sep 11, 2018• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

On-chip heralded single photon sources are of key importance in the development of chip-scale devices exploiting the quantum properties of light. Single photon states can be produced as single photons heralded from correlated photon pairs generated through spontaneous four wave mixing. On-chip heralded single photon sources based on spontaneous four wave mixing have been already demonstrated. However, the heralded and herald photons are usually generated with wavelengths very close to the pump one, limiting the pump rejection efficiency and the application to the mid infrared. Moreover, the common sources of heralded photons based on spontaneous four wave mixing require spectral post filtering to achieve high purity, limiting the brightness and the integration of these sources. A solution to these problems can be provided by intermodal four wave mixing. In this work, we demonstrate the generation of photon pairs through intermodal four wave mixing in silicon waveguides, measuring the coincidences between the idler at 1.281 μm and the signal at 1.952 μm. We then discuss the application of intermodal four wave mixing to on-chip heralded single photon sources.

DOI
10.1117/12.2320956

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On-chip heralded single photon sources are of key importance in the development of chip-scale devices exploiting the quantum properties of light. Single photon states can be produced as single photons heralded from correlated photon pairs generated through spontaneous four wave mixing. On-chip heralded single photon sources based on spontaneous four wave mixing have been already demonstrated. However, the heralded and herald photons are usually generated with wavelengths very close to the pump one, limiting the pump rejection efficiency and the application to the mid infrared. Moreover, the common sources of heralded photons based on spontaneous four wave mixing require spectral post filtering to achieve high purity, limiting the brightness and the integration of these sources. A solution to these problems can be provided by intermodal four wave mixing. In this work, we demonstrate the generation of photon pairs through intermodal four wave mixing in silicon waveguides, measuring the coincidences between the idler at 1.281 μm and the signal at 1.952 μm. We then discuss the application of intermodal four wave mixing to on-chip heralded single photon sources.
Single photon sources by heralding time correlated photons are described. By intermodal four wave mixing (FWM) in a silicon photon circuit, we generate a herald photon at 1260 nm and the heralded one beyond 2 um, with a coincidence to accidental ratio larger than 50 and a single photon purity of 0.75. The discrete band intermodal phase matching does not require further filtering to improve the purity of the single photon. Moreover, the intermodal FWM exhibits high controllability of the signal/idler wavelengths, that can be generated far from the Raman and pump noise, with improved noise filtering.
Mid-infrared integrated quantum photonics is a promising platform for applications in sensing and metrology. However, there are only a few examples of on-chip single-photon sources at these wavelengths. These have limited performances with respect to their C-band counterparts. In this work, we demonstrate a new approach to generate heralded single photons in the mid-infrared on a silicon chip. By using a standard C-band pump, the inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing enables the generation of the herald idler at 1259.7 nm and the heralded signal at 2015 nm. The idler photon is easily detected with a common infrared single-photon detector while the signal photon is upconverted to visible before its detection. In this way, we are able to operate a mid-infrared source without the need for mid-infrared detectors and laser sources. By measuring a heralded g(2) of 0.23 ± 0.08, we demonstrate the single-photon behavior of the source as well as the feasibility of multi-photon coincidence measurements beyond 2 μm with our setup. The source exhibits a high-intrinsic heralding efficiency of (59 ± 5)%, a maximum coincidence to accidental ratio of 40.4 ± 0.9, and a generation probability of 0.70±0.10W−2.
We demonstrate room temperature heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The strong modal confinement and slow group velocity provided by a coupled resonator optical waveguide produced a large four-wave-mixing nonlinearity coefficient γeff≈4100 W−1 m−1 at telecommunications wavelengths. Spontaneous four-wave-mixing using a degenerate pump beam at 1549.6 nm created photon pairs at 1529.5 nm and 1570.5 nm with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding 20. A photon correlation measurement of the signal (1529.5 nm) photons heralded by the detection of the idler (1570.5 nm) photons showed antibunching with g(2)(0)=0.19±0.03. The demonstration of a single photon source within a silicon platform holds promise for future integrated quantum photonic circuits.
In this work, we report the modeling and the experimental demonstration of intermodal spontaneous as well as stimulated four-wave mixing (FWM) in silicon waveguides.In intermodal FWM, the phase-matching condition is achieved by exploiting the different dispersion profiles of the optical modes in a multimode waveguide.Since both the energy and the wave vectors have to be conserved in the FWM process, this leads to a wide tunability of the generated photon wavelength, allowing us to achieve a large spectral conversion.We measured several waveguides that differ by their widths and demonstrate large signal generation spanning from the pump wavelength (1550 nm) down to 1202 nm.A suited setup evidences that the different waves propagated indeed on different order modes, which supports the modeling.Despite observing a reduced efficiency with respect to intramodal FWM due to the decreased modal overlap, we were able to show a maximum spectral distance between the signal and idler of 979.6 nm with a 1550 nm pump.Our measurements suggest the intermodal FWM is a viable means for large wavelength conversion and heralded photon sources.
While integrated photonics is a robust platform for quantum information processing, architectures for photonic quantum computing place stringent demands on high quality information carriers. Sources of single photons that are highly indistinguishable and pure, that are either near-deterministic or heralded with high efficiency, and that are suitable for mass-manufacture, have been elusive. Here, we demonstrate on-chip photon sources that simultaneously meet each of these requirements. Our photon sources are fabricated in silicon using mature processes, and exploit a dual-mode pump-delayed excitation scheme to engineer the emission of spectrally pure photon pairs through inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing in low-loss spiralled multi-mode waveguides. We simultaneously measure a spectral purity of 0.9904 ± 0.0006, a mutual indistinguishability of 0.987 ± 0.002, and >90% intrinsic heralding efficiency. We measure on-chip quantum interference with a visibility of 0.96 ± 0.02 between heralded photons from different sources.