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SPIE Silicon Photonics

High-quality silicon single-photon source for practical quantum network

Jinyi Du, George F. R. Chen, Hongwei Gao, Dawn T. H. Tan, James A. Grieve, Alexander Ling

Published Mar 12, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A high-quality heralded single photon source is realized on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. With the help of specially designed ultra-low loss fiber-chip edge couplers, the heralding efficiency of the single photon source system is 56%, after calibrating for a 38% detector efficiency. Compared with the state of the art, this measured heralding efficiency marks a new milestone for integrated, on-chip silicon sources.

DOI
10.1117/12.2689970

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A high-quality heralded single photon source is realized on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. With the help of specially designed ultra-low loss fiber-chip edge couplers, the heralding efficiency of the single photon source system is 56%, after calibrating for a 38% detector efficiency. Compared with the state of the art, this measured heralding efficiency marks a new milestone for integrated, on-chip silicon sources.
The well-established silicon-on-insulator platform is very promising for large-scale integrated photonic and quantum photonic technologies due to the mature manufacturing technology and integration density. Here, we present an efficient and stable fiber-to-chip coupling, which enables the injection of single photons from telecom quantum dots into a silicon-on-insulator photonic chip. Two additional fibers further couple the chip to single-photon detectors. The approach chosen to achieve steady fiber-chip coupling is based on the use of grating couplers steadily packaged with angled single-mode fibers. Using this technique, coupling efficiencies between the fiber and the SOI chip as high as 69.1% per grating coupler (including the taper losses) are reached. The effective interface between the quantum light generated by quantum dots and the silicon components is verified via the measurement of the second-order correlation function using a Hanbury–Brown and Twiss setup. With g(2)(0)=0.051±0.001, it clearly proves the single-photon nature of the injected QD photons. This demonstrates the reliability of the interfacing method and opens the route to employ telecom quantum dots as non-classical light sources with high complexity silicon photonic functionalities.
A key obstacle to the experimental realization of many photonic quantum-enhanced technologies is the lack of low-loss sources of single photons in pure quantum states. We demonstrate a promising solution: generation of heralded single photons in a silica photonic chip by spontaneous four-wave mixing. A heralding efficiency of 40%, corresponding to a preparation efficiency of 80% accounting for detector performance, is achieved due to efficient coupling of the low-loss source to optical fibers. A single photon purity of 0.86 is measured from the source number statistics without narrow spectral filtering, and confirmed by direct measurement of the joint spectral intensity. We calculate that similar high-heralded-purity output can be obtained from visible to telecom spectral regions using this approach. On-chip silica sources can have immediate application in a wide range of single-photon quantum optics applications which employ silica photonics.
While integrated photonics is a robust platform for quantum information processing, architectures for photonic quantum computing place stringent demands on high quality information carriers. Sources of single photons that are highly indistinguishable and pure, that are either near-deterministic or heralded with high efficiency, and that are suitable for mass-manufacture, have been elusive. Here, we demonstrate on-chip photon sources that simultaneously meet each of these requirements. Our photon sources are fabricated in silicon using mature processes, and exploit a dual-mode pump-delayed excitation scheme to engineer the emission of spectrally pure photon pairs through inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing in low-loss spiralled multi-mode waveguides. We simultaneously measure a spectral purity of 0.9904 ± 0.0006, a mutual indistinguishability of 0.987 ± 0.002, and >90% intrinsic heralding efficiency. We measure on-chip quantum interference with a visibility of 0.96 ± 0.02 between heralded photons from different sources.
The capability of realizing quantum photonics implementations on-chip will have a strong impact on several aspects of quantum computation and information processing. The implementation of large scale integrated quantum photonic technologies requires on-chip reconfigurable waveguide circuits as well as single-photon sources and detectors. Many successes have been made in recent years to demonstrate complex quantum circuits in many material platforms. Among all these platforms, the Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) platform is outstanding as it is well developed for classical applications and therefore deploys a high component density, mature fabrication techniques and compatibility with the telecom regime and the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. However, the lack of on-demand non-classical light sources, directly incorporated in silicon chips, forces the use of nonlinear processes to generate non-classical light states: the probabilistic nature of the emission process sets a limit in the maximally achievable experimental complexity. The use of on-demand sources will have a strong impact on the device’s scalability.