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Sensors

On-Chip Group-IV Heisenberg-Limited Sagnac Interferometric Gyroscope at Room Temperature

Francesco De Leonardis, Richard A. Soref, Martino De Carlo, Vittorio M. N. Passaro

Published Jun 19, 2020• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A room-temperature strip-guided "manufacturable" Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI)/GeSn integrated-photonics quantum-gyroscope chip operating at 1550 nm is proposed and analysed. We demonstrate how the entangled photons generated in Si Spontaneous Four Wave Mixing (SFWM) can be used to improve the resolution of a Sagnac interferometric gyroscope. We propose different integrated architectures based on degenerate and non-degenerate SFWM. The chip comprises several beam splitters, two SFWM entangled photon sources, a pump filter, integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric gyro, and an array of waveguide coupled GeSn/Ge/Si single-photon avalanche detectors. The laser pumped SWFM sources generate the signal-idler pairs, which, in turn, are used to measure the two-photon, four-photon, and higher order coincidences, resulting in an increasing of the gyro resolution by a factor of two and four, with respect to the classical approach.

DOI
10.3390/s20123476

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In this talk, I will discuss two applications of nonlinear quantum photonics in silicon nanowires: correlated photon pair sources and a single-photon wavelength converter. Correlated photon pairs can be generated in a nonlinear silicon waveguide through the spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) process, where two photons from a bright pump laser are annihilated, and a two photons are spontaneously created at different wavelengths (the signal and idler). However, indistinguishable photon pairs are of particular interest for two-photon interference experiments, meaning that the signal and idler should have the same wavelength and be entirely identical to each other. Indistinguishable pairs can be generated with the SFWM process. where two pump lasers create a degenerate signal and idler at the frequency mid-way between them. Since the two photons are indistinguishable, it is not trivial to divide them into separate waveguides so as to manipulate them individually. I will present recent results concerning a silicon quantum splitter, where degenerate pairs are created in a ring resonator which is pumped in both directions. The ring is coupled to a sagnac loop interferometer, which combines the two directions at a 50 : 50 coupler. Here, a quantum interference effect (reverse-Hong Ou Mandel interference) splits the photons to two output waveguides. This device is ultra-compact and the use of a sagnac loop means that the phase is automatically set correctly for the interference. I will also discuss progress on single photon wavelength conversion in silicon nanowires using the four-wave mixing Bragg scattering (FWMBS) process. Here, two intense pump beams are used to modulate a weak signal, causing it to shift to the idler by the frequency difference between the pumps. In principle, this can allow coherent, noiseless frequency conversion of single photon signals. Fig. 1(b) shows output spectra from a 6mm silicon nanowire when the frequency shift is varied 100 GHz to 400 GHz. Multiple peaks are visible, corresponding to up-conversion and down-conversion of the input signal.

Progress in Electromagnetic Research Symposium•Aug 1, 2016•0 citations
A room-temperature strip-guided "manufacturable" Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI)/GeSn integrated-photonics quantum-gyroscope chip operating at 1550 nm is proposed and analysed. We demonstrate how the entangled photons generated in Si Spontaneous Four Wave Mixing (SFWM) can be used to improve the resolution of a Sagnac interferometric gyroscope. We propose different integrated architectures based on degenerate and non-degenerate SFWM. The chip comprises several beam splitters, two SFWM entangled photon sources, a pump filter, integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric gyro, and an array of waveguide coupled GeSn/Ge/Si single-photon avalanche detectors. The laser pumped SWFM sources generate the signal-idler pairs, which, in turn, are used to measure the two-photon, four-photon, and higher order coincidences, resulting in an increasing of the gyro resolution by a factor of two and four, with respect to the classical approach.
We propose and analyze three Si-based room-temperature strip-guided “manufacturable” integrated quantum photonic chem/bio sensor chips operating at wavelengths of 1550 nm, 1330 nm, and 640 nm, respectively. We propose design rules that will achieve super-sensitivity (above the classical limit) by means of mixing between states of coherent light and single-mode squeezed-light. The silicon-on-insulator (SOI), silicon-on-sapphire (SOS), and silicon nitride-on-SiO2-on Si (SiN) platforms have been investigated. Each chip is comprised of photonic building blocks: a race-track resonator, a pump filter, an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric chem/bio sensor, and a photonic circuit to perform parity measurements, where our homodyne measurement circuit avoids the use of single-photon-counting detectors and utilizes instead conventional photodetectors. A combination of super-sensitivity with super-resolution is predicted for all three platforms to be used for chem/bio sensing applications.
Integrated sources of indistinguishable photons have garnered significant attention due to their applications in optical quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum networks. However, photons generated from spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) always occur in pairs, which need to be split into different modes for further applications. Here, we present a quantum splitter for degenerate photon pairs based on a silicon photonic chip. This device incorporates a Sagnac loop, two asymmetrical Mach-Zehnder interferometers (AMZIs), and a spiral waveguide. The spiral waveguide generates pairs of photons, the Sagnac loop facilitates bidirectional pumping of the source, and the two AMZIs enables the extraction of photons from the pump light. The photons generated from two directions interfere at a balanced multi-mode interferemeter (MMI) to enable the reversed Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect to take place. Our experimental results demonstrated an on-chip interference visibility of 96.63% and an off-chip HOM dip visibility of 90.93%, indicating that the generated photons are well-suited for further integration with other components in quantum applications.
Large-scale quantum photonic circuits require integrating multiple single-photon sources, which are typically based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in spiral waveguides or microring resonators (MRRs). Photons can be generated in both clockwise (CW) and counterclockwise (CCW) orientations from a single source in a Sagnac configuration, showing promise for improving scalability. In this work, we propose a fully integrable scheme for bidirectional creation and usage of single photons. This concept is based on two asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometers (AMZIs) integrated within the Sagnac loop. As a proof of concept, we fabricated a device with a spiral waveguide on a silicon chip and demonstrated its application as a quantum splitter and two multi-wavelength quantum light sources.
Photon pair sources are an important building block for optics based Quantum Information Processing (QIP) such as Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Linear Optics Quantum Computing (LOQC) [1]. Beyond the demand for reliable and cheap photon pair sources for QKD, LOQC also requires interferometers that are mechanically stable and loss-free for which integrated photonics is particularly attractive [2]. In this context, photon pair generation (PPG) has been demonstrated via the third order nonlinear interaction between a silicon straight waveguide (Si-w) and a pulsed beam [3]. Such a source cannot be directly followed by other integrated components as photon pairs would be generated throughout the silicon chip. The solution we propose to suppress the pump beam consists of a Sagnac Loop Interferometer (SLI) in which photon pairs are generated and pump beam destructively interferes with itself, thereby allowing photon pairs to be generated in a localised part of the silicon chip. Furthermore, our study has been performed in a continuous instead of a pulsed regime, thereby avoiding any synchronization between detectors and laser and allowing for much cheaper laser sources. Our experimental setup is presented in Fig. 1. The experiment is performed at different pump power both in the a Si-w and the SLI. Results are presented in Fig. 2. The flux of generated pairs and the Signal-to-noise ratio are limited by the outcoupling loss and detector inefficiency. The photon flux is less than expected because the emitted spectrum is around 8nm (FWHM) broad instead of the expected 70nm. The performance of the SLI is not yet perfect: the pump suppression efficiency decreases with the pump power (from −22dB to −15dB) due to unexpected nonlinear behaviour in the directional coupler that changes the coupling ratio; and the Signal-to-Noise ratio is lower than in the Si-w which might be due to PPG in the broad (800nm) waveguide before the SLI.
Silicon quantum photonics promises to take quantum optics to the large scale, where single photons carry the quantum information which can accelerate difficult computational problems, provide perfectly secure communication, or allow high-accuracy measurements. The silicon photonics platform offers miniature, high-yield, and high-performance photonics which are integrable with CMOS electronics and telecommunications-band optics. To date, only non-scalable photon-pair sources, based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in straight silicon waveguides have been shown to interfere [1]. Until now, single-photon experiments in silicon [2] have exclusively used an off-chip apparatus, such as a silica arrayed waveguide grating, to control and manipulate photon frequency. We present a silicon-on-insulator quantum photonic device (Fig. 1a) able to generate and analyse two maximally entangled qubits. We use this device to demonstrate high-visibility quantum interferencebetween resonant SFWM sources (analogous to [1]), phase-stable frequency-selection, and quantum state tomography. We varied the phase  to obtain the fringes shown in Fig. 1b, with a visibility of 96.8%. This high visibility indicates that the two microring sources are substantially identical. We setup the entangled state via the on-chip 17-dB extinction filters, and used quantum state tomography to analyse it (Fig. 1c). We measured a fidelity of 0.8. This is the first time an entangled state of photonic qubits has been both generated and analysed on-chip, and this generation has been done in a way which is scalable to larger photon number. These results represent a new step towards fully silicon-integrated quantum photonics.
In this talk, I will discuss two applications of nonlinear quantum photonics in silicon nanowires: correlated photon pair sources and a single-photon wavelength converter. Correlated photon pairs can be generated in a nonlinear silicon waveguide through the spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) process, where two photons from a bright pump laser are annihilated, and a two photons are spontaneously created at different wavelengths (the signal and idler). However, indistinguishable photon pairs are of particular interest for two-photon interference experiments, meaning that the signal and idler should have the same wavelength and be entirely identical to each other. Indistinguishable pairs can be generated with the SFWM process. where two pump lasers create a degenerate signal and idler at the frequency mid-way between them. Since the two photons are indistinguishable, it is not trivial to divide them into separate waveguides so as to manipulate them individually. I will present recent results concerning a silicon quantum splitter, where degenerate pairs are created in a ring resonator which is pumped in both directions. The ring is coupled to a sagnac loop interferometer, which combines the two directions at a 50 : 50 coupler. Here, a quantum interference effect (reverse-Hong Ou Mandel interference) splits the photons to two output waveguides. This device is ultra-compact and the use of a sagnac loop means that the phase is automatically set correctly for the interference. I will also discuss progress on single photon wavelength conversion in silicon nanowires using the four-wave mixing Bragg scattering (FWMBS) process. Here, two intense pump beams are used to modulate a weak signal, causing it to shift to the idler by the frequency difference between the pumps. In principle, this can allow coherent, noiseless frequency conversion of single photon signals. Fig. 1(b) shows output spectra from a 6mm silicon nanowire when the frequency shift is varied 100 GHz to 400 GHz. Multiple peaks are visible, corresponding to up-conversion and down-conversion of the input signal.