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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Near-ideal heralded single photons in silicon

Stefano Signorini, Massimo Borghi, Lorenzo Pavesi, Stefano Paesani, Alexandre Maïnos, Anthony Laing

Published Jan 1, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Single photons for quantum computing should be pure, indistinguishable and available in a large amount on the same chip. By using pump-delayed intermodal spontaneous four wave mixing we demonstrated the first source of heralded single photons meeting all these requirements on a silicon chip.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2021.ftu2n.2

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Heralded single photon sources, based on probabilistic non-linear interactions, currently serve as the de-facto standard for performing multi-photon quantum interference experiments. Already, interesting phenomena may be explored with a handful of such sources [1], whilst in the future, large arrays of identical sources could be multiplexed with a switching network to achieve a truly scalable, near-deterministic emission [2]. However, fabricating such a large number of indistinguishable, pure, heralded single photon sources, operating with low-loss, remains an open challenge. Spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a silica waveguide is a promising route to building such a source. The low-loss and excellent mode-matching to optical fibre of silica waveguides allows high preparation efficiency. Guided-wave photonics also allows the precise control of the optical modes needed to engineer emission of photons into a single pair of Schmidt modes: allowing heralded photons of high purity without narrowband filtering [3].