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International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena

Femtosecond pulse engineering for bright solid-state quantum emitters

Grant R. Wilbur, Ali Binai-Motlagh, Alison Clarke, Ajan P. Ramachandran, Nick Milson, John Healey, Sabine O’Neal, DENNIS GLENN DEPPE, Kimberley C. Hall

Published Jan 1, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For triggered single photon sources, resonant pumping of a quantum emitter is desired for maximal indistiguishability, but there is a need to reject the scattered pump light from the excitation laser. Here we offer a deterministic, robust scheme for initializing the quantum emitter with zero excitation light at the emission energy using general pulse shaping techniques.

DOI
10.1364/up.2022.th4a.25

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For triggered single photon sources, resonant pumping of a quantum emitter is desired for maximal indistiguishability, but there is a need to reject the scattered pump light from the excitation laser. Here we offer a deterministic, robust scheme for initializing the quantum emitter with zero excitation light at the emission energy using general pulse shaping techniques.
Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) may be applied to solid-state quantum emitters of interest for quantum light sources or nodes in distributed quantum networks. For such emitters, resonant optical driving results in the highest degree of photon indistinguishability, but leads to the need to reject scattered light from the laser used to drive the emitter. In this work, we apply femtosecond pulse shaping techniques to the development of quantum state inversion strategies for QD emitters that optimize fidelity and source brightness. The control protocols we have developed would be applicable to a wide range of solid-state QE systems.
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The preparation of photonic qubits in the excited state is an integral part of the performance of an on-demand single photon source (SPS). Conventional resonant excitation, an excellent approach to maximize the coherence and indistinguishability of the SPS, often requires polarization filtering to remove the pump signal and isolate the qubit emission, but this results in an inherent 50\% hit to the efficiency. Recent excitation schemes strategically try to exploit pulses that excite the qubit while avoiding spectral overlap to bypass this required filtering. In this work, we compare three such pumping schemes to quantify the important SPS figures-of-merit for off-resonant quantum dot schemes, using: (i) a symmetrically detuned dichromatic pulse, (ii) a notch-filtered adiabatic rapid passage (NARP) pulse, and (iii) a swing up of the quantum emitter population (SUPER) pulse. Due to large instantaneous pulse strengths, the dichromatic pulse suffers from phonon-induced dephasing which can lower the SPS performance by up to 50\%. In contrast, the NARP and SUPER pulses are shielded from phonon coupling to differing degrees but both maintain excellent SPS performance. The SUPER pulse can lose significant efficiency if there is variance in its constituent pulses' amplitude, pulse width, or frequency, while the NARP pulse, though potentially more difficult to realize in experiments, is robust against variance in the pulse preparation.
We present a driving scheme for solid-state quantum emitters using frequency-swept pulses containing a spectral hole resonant with the optical transition in the emitter. Our scheme enables high-fidelity state inversion, exhibits robustness to variations in the laser pulse parameters and is immune to phonon-mediated excitation-induced dephasing, benefits that derive from the the insensitivity of the adiabaticity condition to variations in the experimental parameters. Our resonant driving approach could be combined with spectral filtering of the scattered pump light and photonic devices for enhanced collection efficiency to realize simultaneous high indistinguishability and brightness in single photon source applications.