Photonic quantum technologies represent a promising platform for applications ranging from long-distance secure communications to the simulation of complex phenomena. Among the different material platforms, direct bandgap semiconductors offer a wide range of functionalities opening promising perspectives for the implementation of future quantum technologies. In this paper, we review our progress on the generation and manipulation of quantum states of light in nonlinear AlGaAs chips and their use in quantum networks.
Photonic quantum technologies represent a promising platform for applications ranging from long-distance secure communications to the simulation of complex phenomena. Among the different material platforms, direct bandgap semiconductors offer a wide range of functionalities opening promising perspectives for the implementation of future quantum technologies. In this paper, we review our progress on the generation and manipulation of quantum states of light in nonlinear AlGaAs chips and their use in quantum networks.
Photonic quantum technologies are a promising platform for applications ranging from long-distance secure communications to the simulation of complex phenomena. Among the different material platforms direct bandgap semiconductors offer a wide range of functionalities opening promising perspectives for the implementation of future quantum technologies. In this talk, I review our progress on the generation and manipulation of quantum states of light in nonlinear AlGaAs chips and their use in quantum networks.
Integrated photonics provides a powerful approach for developing compact, stable and scalable architectures for the generation, manipulation and detection of quantum states of light. To this end, several material platforms are being developed in parallel, each providing its specific assets, and hybridization techniques to combine their strengths are now possible. This review focuses on AlGaAs, a III-V semiconductor platform combining a mature fabrication technology, direct band-gap compliant with electrical injection, low-loss operation, large electro-optic effect, and compatibility with superconducting detectors for on-chip detection. We detail recent implementations of room-temperature sources of quantum light based on the high second- and third-order optical nonlinearities of the material, as well as photonic circuits embedding various functionalities ranging from polarizing beamsplitters to Mach-Zehnder interferometers, modulators and tunable filters. We then present several realizations of quantum state engineering enabled by these recent advances and discuss open perspectives and remaining challenges in the field of integrated quantum photonics with AlGaAs.
Nonclassical states of light are an essential resource for many emerging quantum technologies and applications ranging from information processing, encrypted communications, and networking to sensing, metrology, and imaging. Nonlinear optical processes in solid-state materials are widely used for generating quantum light, including single photons, entangled-photon pairs, and quadrature-squeezed states. Recent advances in nonlinear photonics have enabled the functionality of benchtop nonlinear instruments to be scaled down to a single chip without sacrificing efficiency or degrading the key performance metrics. The dramatic improvement in the size, weight, power, cost, and stability enabled by photonic integrated circuits has been essential for enabling the chip-scale generation, manipulation, and detection of quantum light at a steadily increasing degree of complexity and scale. Within the last decade, the authors have seen the progression from few-component photonic circuits operating on two photons to arrays of 18 identical heralded single-photon sources and reconfigurable devices operating with more than 650 components for multidimensional entanglement and arbitrary two-photon quantum gates. In this review, the authors summarize the history and recent key technological developments of chip-scale nonlinear quantum light generation based on integrated nonlinear photonics, recent advances in heterogeneous integrated methods, and approaches for system-level integration and demonstrated applications.
The ability to generate complex optical photon states involving entanglement between multiple optical modes is not only critical to advancing our understanding of quantum mechanics but will play a key role in generating many applications in quantum technologies. These include quantum communications, computation, imaging, microscopy and many other novel technologies that are constantly being proposed. However, approaches to generating parallel multiple, customisable bi- and multi-entangled quantum bits (qubits) on a chip are still in the early stages of development. Here, we review recent advances in the realisation of integrated sources of photonic quantum states, focusing on approaches based on nonlinear optics that are compatible with contemporary optical fibre telecommunications and quantum memory platforms as well as with chip-scale semiconductor technology. These new and exciting platforms hold the promise of compact, low-cost, scalable and practical implementations of sources for the generation and manipulation of complex quantum optical states on a chip, which will play a major role in bringing quantum technologies out of the laboratory and into the real world.
We present our results on the generation and manipulation of high dimensional quantum frequency states of light generated with AlGaAs chips working in the telecom band at room temperature. In the case of devices based on a collinear phase matching scheme we propose a method to generate and control the symmetry of broadband biphoton frequency combs, exploiting the interplay of cavity effects and relative temporal delay between the two photons of each pair. In the case of devices based on a transverse pump configuration we demonstrate that engineering the spatial properties of the pump beam allows to produce frequency-anticorrelated, correlated and separable states, and to control the parity of the biphoton wavefunction to induce either bosonic or fermionic particle statistics. These results open promising perspectives for communication and computation protocols exploiting high-dimensional quantum states, as well as for the quantum simulation of fermionic problems with photons on an integrated platform.
We provide an overview of quantum photonic network on chip. We begin from the discussion of the pros and cons of several material platforms for engineering quantum photonic chips. Then we introduce and analyze the basic building blocks and functional units of quantum photonic integrated circuits. In the main part of this review, we focus on the generation and manipulation of quantum states of light on chip and are particularly interested in some applications of advanced integrated circuits with different functionalities for quantum information processing, including quantum communication, quantum computing, and quantum simulation. We emphasize that developing fully integrated quantum photonic chip which contains sources of quantum light, integrate circuits, modulators, quantum storage, and detectors are promising approaches for future quantum photonic technologies. Recent achievements in the large scale photonic chips for linear optical computing are also included. Finally, we illustrate the challenges toward high performance quantum information processing devices and conclude with promising perspectives in this field.