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Optics Letters

Tunable silicon integrated quantum light source with on-chip FSR-free filters

Zhiming Jin, Qirui Ren, Dongning Liu, Xiaosong Ren, Yidong Huang, Wei Zhang

Published Oct 16, 2024• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this work, we design and fabricate a telecom band quantum light source (QLS) on a silicon photonic chip, which integrates a piece of a long silicon waveguide as the nonlinear medium for spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) and five narrow FSR-free bandpass filters based on a grating-assisted contra-directional coupler (GACDC). Two optical filtering functions of the silicon integrated QLS have been demonstrated. First, the QLS supports two tunable outputs of photon pair generations by four GACDC filters. A wavelength tunable range of 6 nm is demonstrated. Second, one GACDC bandpass filter is designed as an on-chip pump filter before the silicon waveguide. The performances of the QLSs with and without the on-chip pump filter are measured and compared. It shows that the on-chip pump filter has the effect to enhance the performance of the QLS by suppressing the Raman noise photons generated when a pump light propagated in optical fibers before it is injected into the chip. These results show that FSR-free filters would play important roles in developing silicon integrated QLSs.

DOI
10.1364/ol.533799

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In this work, we design and fabricate a telecom band quantum light source (QLS) on a silicon photonic chip, which integrates a piece of a long silicon waveguide as the nonlinear medium for spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) and five narrow FSR-free bandpass filters based on a grating-assisted contra-directional coupler (GACDC). Two optical filtering functions of the silicon integrated QLS have been demonstrated. First, the QLS supports two tunable outputs of photon pair generations by four GACDC filters. A wavelength tunable range of 6 nm is demonstrated. Second, one GACDC bandpass filter is designed as an on-chip pump filter before the silicon waveguide. The performances of the QLSs with and without the on-chip pump filter are measured and compared. It shows that the on-chip pump filter has the effect to enhance the performance of the QLS by suppressing the Raman noise photons generated when a pump light propagated in optical fibers before it is injected into the chip. These results show that FSR-free filters would play important roles in developing silicon integrated QLSs.
Abstract To fully utilize the resources provided by optical fiber networks, a cross-band quantum light source generating photon pairs, where one photon in a pair is at C band and the other is at O band, is proposed in this work. This source is based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a piece of shallow-ridge silicon waveguide. Theoretical analysis shows that the waveguide dispersion could be tailored by adjusting the ridge width, enabling broadband photon pair generation by SFWM across C band and O band. The spontaneous Raman scattering (SpRS) in silicon waveguides is also investigated experimentally. It shows that there are two regions in the spectrum of generated photons from SpRS, which could be used to achieve cross-band photon pair generation. A chip of shallow-ridge silicon waveguide samples with different ridge widths has been fabricated, through which cross-band photon pair generation is demonstrated experimentally. The experimental results show that the source can be achieved using dispersion-optimized shallow-ridge silicon waveguides. This cross-band quantum light source provides a way to develop new fiber-based quantum communication functions utilizing both C band and O band and extends applications of quantum networks.
We report an integrated tunable-bandwidth optical filter with a passband to stop-band ratio of over 96 dB using a single silicon chip with an ultra-compact footprint. The integrated filter is used in filtering out the pump photons in non-degenerate spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM), which is used for producing correlated photon pairs at different wavelengths. SFWM occurs in a long silicon waveguide, and two cascaded second-order coupled-resonator optical waveguide (CROW) filters were used to spectrally remove the pump photons. The tunable bandwidth of the filter is useful to adjust the coherence time of the quantum correlated photons and may find applications in large-scale integrated quantum photonic circuits.
We report the design of an integrated visible-telecom photon pair source based on Counter Propagating Spontaneous Four Wave Mixing (CP-SFWM) in a Silicon Nitride (Si3N4) chip with no need of dispersion profile engineering. Two lasers are pumped at 800 nm and 1550 nm at both ends of the optical fiber, generating signal and idler photons at the same wavelengths but with opposite propagation directions, relative to their corresponding pumps. Moreover, these photons exhibit a spectral bandwidth on the order of MHz, achieved by using a high Q factor ring resonator.
We demonstrate theoretically the direct (filter-free) generation of spectrally uncorrelated photon pairs, and consequently high-purity heralded single photons at telecommunication wavelengths, in SOI (silicon-on-insulator) nanowaveguides via spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM). The inherent strong waveguide dispersion in such high-index contrast structures is employed for discrete-band phase-matching in order to suppress the pair spectral correlations, and to produce photons in the fundamental spatial mode for easy in-out coupling to single-mode optical fibers. Additionally, by optimizing the source parameters like waveguide length, dispersion and pump bandwidth, the group-velocity of generated photons is also engineered to further eliminate spectral correlations. Extensive numerical mode simulations for various waveguide widths are used to design intrinsically pure photon sources via joint spectral amplitude (JSA) engineering. Purity$>9595% is shown to be achievable in a silica-clad SOI waveguide with a cross-section 220 × 600 nm95^{2}fortypicalvaluesoflengthandpumpbandwidth.Thewavelengthoftheseheraldedsinglephotonscanbetunedintherangeof1266–1363nm(for typical values of length and pump bandwidth. The wavelength of these heralded single photons can be tuned in the range of 1266–1363 nm (fortypicalvaluesoflengthandpumpbandwidth.Thewavelengthoftheseheraldedsinglephotonscanbetunedintherangeof1266–1363nm(\sim$O-band) by varying the pump wavelength. Considering the high accuracy provided by silicon nanofabrication techniques, the feasibility of generating single photons across the wavelength range 1333–1425 nm (E-band) and 1437–1510 nm (S-band) for slightly different waveguide widths (625 nm & 650 nm) is also demonstrated. These filter-free integrated photon sources could be important for large-scale linear optical quantum computation (LOQC) and long-distance fiber-optic quantum key distribution (QKD) networks.
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).