Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)
Short-Wave Infrared Correlated Photons from Silicon Waveguides
Lawrence M. Rosenfeld, Dominic A. Sulway, Mark G. Thompson, John Rarity, Joshua W. Silverstone
Abstract
Quantum technologies that harness the properties of superposition and entanglement promise to revolutionise many fields, from information processing to metrology. Silicon-integrated quantum photonics operating in the telecom band suffers from deleterious two-photon absorption (TPA) [1,2]. Cross-TPA reduces the brightness and ultimately the heralding efficiency [3] of spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) photon-pair sources, where single photons necessarily co-propagate with a bright pump. Nonlinear losses can be mitigated by pumping and generating photons with energies close to and beyond silicon's two-photon band edge [4,5]. We report the first quantum-correlated photon pairs in the 2.1 μm short-wave infrared (SWIR) band, produced on-chip from a silicon waveguide spiral.