Silicon photonics appears to be the most promising technology to address the quantum photonics developments, because it is suitable to implement all stages of a quantum photonic system, such as sources, manipulation devices and receivers. In this paper, we analyse and design a pump filter with large extinction ratio (ER), narrow bandwidth (BW) and small insertion loss (IL), to achieve an efficient single-photon detection, as required by photon-pair systems. Most promising on-chip silicon-based solutions, mainly based on ring resonators and Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) are reviewed. The main drawbacks of these technologies have been critically investigated, with reference to the ER-BW conflict. To overcome this bottleneck, an additional research effort needs to investigate new high-performance devices in terms of ER, IL and BW combined with small footprint.
Silicon photonics appears to be the most promising technology to address the quantum photonics developments, because it is suitable to implement all stages of a quantum photonic system, such as sources, manipulation devices and receivers. In this paper, we analyse and design a pump filter with large extinction ratio (ER), narrow bandwidth (BW) and small insertion loss (IL), to achieve an efficient single-photon detection, as required by photon-pair systems. Most promising on-chip silicon-based solutions, mainly based on ring resonators and Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) are reviewed. The main drawbacks of these technologies have been critically investigated, with reference to the ER-BW conflict. To overcome this bottleneck, an additional research effort needs to investigate new high-performance devices in terms of ER, IL and BW combined with small footprint.
Integrated photonic circuits have become an attractive platform for the quantum information processing, paving the way for quantum information management with scalable device. In this context, silicon photonics represents the most mature technology to implement the quantum system functionalities, due to its large scalability and compatibility with CMOS technology. Efficient photon-pairs sources based on Spontaneous Four-Wave Mixing (SFWM) and high-performance photodetector have been already demonstrated. The efficient detection of photon-pairs requires a pump filter at the photodetector, preserving the signal-idler pair. Thus, filters with high Extinction Ratio (ER), low Insertion Loss (IL) and narrow rejection Bandwidth (BW) are needed. Here, we propose the design of an ultra-high-performance rejection filter, based on a silicon dual-loaded single input/output Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI), with one branch coupled to a Ring Resonator (RR) and the other to three serially coupled RRs forming a Coupled Optical Resonator Waveguide (CROW). Very high performance (ER = 150.55 dB, IL = 0.104 dB, BW = 0.243 nm), within a footprint of 60 µm × 160 µm, has been calculated, demonstrating its suitability for an efficient suppression of the pump signal. The filter response is also thermo-optically tuneable in a 6 MHz range, with a reconfigurability time of about 8 µs.
Integrated photon-pair sources are fundamental building blocks of any quantum circuit. Spontaneous four-wave mixing in Si micro-resonators has already shown efficient on-chip generation of entangled photon pairs. However, owing to the substantially higher pump intensity, compared to that of the photon-pair signal, suppression of the pump requires rejection levels exceeding 100 dB. Besides strong pump suppression, narrow rejection bandwidth (<; 10 nm) is particularly important to allow short wavelength separation of the paired photons, thereby minimizing dispersion effects in the micro-ring that may reduce the efficiency of the nonlinear process. Implementing such pump-rejection filter on chip remains a challenge. Indeed, the only demonstration of photon-pair generation with on-chip pump rejection required cascading two identical chips, compromising the feasibility of the solution. The main reason for this is the limited rejection achieved by state-of-the-art on-chip Bragg filters. Ultra-high rejection has been demonstrated in actively controlled filters at the expense of increased insertion loss and a high complexity, due to the control of all the filters. Nevertheless, photon-pair generation with effective pump rejection in a single chip has not been demonstrated yet.
Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers have been developed for electronic integrated circuits, but are also one of the most promising platforms in photonic integrated circuits due to its low loss, high refractive index, ability to fast phase modulation, and well-developed fabrication technologies. With advantages to handle light with a small volume and high modulation speed, silicon photonics has been intensively investigated as the next generation platform of signal processing, interconnection, and communication devices. Recently, silicon photonics has been attracted great interests in quantum optics communities as optical quantum systems for linear optical quantum computing are achievable using silicon photonic components including beam splitters, phase modulators, and filters and the small footprint of a silicon photonic quantum system has unprecedented performances of high stability and scalability. Here we show our recent results on the fabrication of silicon photonic elements for quantum applications. We fabricated low-loss optical waveguides, efficient fiber-to-waveguide grating couplers, resonator-based optical filters, and tunable beam splitters and tested their performances. A micro-sized heater is attached on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, showing stable operation as a slow phase modulator. In addition, phase modulators using plasma dispersion effects are under investigation. Finally, the quantum characteristics of photon pairs generated by spontaneous four-wave mixing in silicon waveguides are investigated. These results will be an essential cornerstone for the realization of quantum optical computing and quantum communication devices.
Considerable research work is being devoted to the integration of quantum optical components on a silicon chip [1]. Many results have been achieved on the generation of quantum states of light in silicon photonic devices, but all the sources demonstrated so far need off-chip filtering stages to clean the generated photons before detection. This necessity for off-chip components hinders usability in a completely integrated platform. In this work [2] we demonstrate for the first time on-chip generation of photon pairs via a silicon microring resonator fully integrated with spectral filters for the pump on the same chip. The sample, shown in Fig. 1 a, is a reconfigurable silicon photonic integrated circuit based on Bragg reflectors and tunable ring resonators. The combination of these devices results in pump rejection by more than 95 dB in a single chip, reducing the pump intensity to less than the flux of the photon pairs generated by spontaneous four wave mixing (Fig 1 b).
Photon pair generation via spontaneous four-wave mixing in silicon waveguides/microring resonators integrated with a high extinction pump rejection filter is very much in demand for futuristic large-scale integrated quantum photonics circuits. Ideally, a distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) can be designed to offer desired pump rejection. However, fabricated DBRs suffer degradation in pump extinction due to roughness-induced unwanted scattering waves in the forward direction around the Bragg wavelength. It is therefore inferred that the roughness-induced forward scattering can be reduced significantly by integrating a DBR structure in one of the sidewalls (instead of two sidewalls) of a multimode rib waveguide (instead of a single mode strip waveguide). Therefore, we studied a single-stage DBR filter with this design which exhibits a significantly higher stop band extinction (∼63 dB), in comparison with that of earlier reported results (<50 dB). To validate the pump rejection efficiency of such fabricated devices in quantum photonic applications, we have carried out on-chip stimulated four-wave mixing experiments and shown that the pump laser within the rejection band could be attenuated to the level of idler power.
One of the key building blocks of quantum photonic systems is a source of indistinguishable photons. Silicon ring resonators can be used as photon pair sources by taking advantage of silicon's large third order nonlinearity with a process known as spontaneous four wave mixing. These sources are capable of producing pairs of indistinguishable photons but typically suffer from an effective 50% loss. By slightly decoupling the input waveguide from the ring, the desired photons generated in the ring can be directed to the drop port. Thus, the ratio between the coincidences from the drop port and the total number of coincidences from all ports (coincidence efficiency) can be significantly increased, with the trade-off being that the pump is less efficiently coupled into the ring. This asymmetric coupling scheme was used to demonstrate a dual-bus microring source with a coincidence efficiency of ~96%. Unfortunately, the penalty to pump power was quite large, with a required ~10x increase in the pump power to maintain the same pair generation rate.\nTo further improve upon this result, a microring source was designed with multipoint evanescent couplers to induce a strong spectral dependence in the coupling coefficients. This coupler design can be used on both sides of the ring resonator so that resonances supported by one of the couplers are suppressed by the other. This is the ideal configuration for a ring-based photon-pair source as it can only support the pump photons at the input side while only allowing the generated photons to leave through the output side. Asymmetric coupling was also used in this configuration but in a different way than in the previous source. In this case, the input side of the ring was configured to be critically coupled for maximal resonance enhancement while the output side was configured to be over coupled to minimize photon-pair loss within the ring. This device design was used to demonstrate a photon-pair source with coincidence efficiencies of 0.9981+-6.425x10^-4 and 0.9979+-1.665x10^-3 for degenerate and non-degenerate pump configuration respectively.\nIn addition to the source development, work was done to move some of the pump rejection filtering onto the photonic chip. While the fabricated device only exhibited an extinction of 50 dB, the root cause of the limited extinction was explored and a new filter design was proposed to overcome these limitations. With the combination of the microring source with its greatly improved efficiency and the movement toward reducing the required off-chip filtering, this work represents a significant advancement in the scalability of integrated quantum photonic systems which can enable high performance quantum computing and communication systems.