A bright, silicon-based entangled photon source for metropolitan quantum communication

Mohsen Shokrolahi, A. Allahi, Ali Poursohrabi +1 more

Zi-Heng Jiang, Yikai Chen, Wenhan Yan +10 more

Entangled photon pairs are of crucial importance in quantum networks. For the future demands of large-scale and secure quantum communication, integrated photon sources are highly effective solutions. Here, we report entanglement distribution over 30 km in a metropolitan area using an on-chip broadband silicon nanowire biphoton polarization-entangled source based on a silicon-on-insulator platform. This source generates a continuous spectrum spanning the entire C band (4.5 THz), achieving locally detected coincidence counts of about 154 kHz within a 100-GHz bandwidth, making it suitable for long-distance entanglement distribution among multiple users. By combining this source with quantum entanglement, enhanced by high-precision clock synchronization that achieves a standard deviation of 56.8 ps over 600 s, we observe a violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality by 27.8 standard deviations. Our results showcase the potential of silicon photonic technology as a scalable and practical platform for quantum technologies.

R. M. Stevenson, Robert James Young, P. Atkinson +3 more

Xin Hua, Yan Xu, Lu Tie Xu +6 more

Developing a high-quality, bright source of polarization-entangled photon pairs on CMOS-compatible integrated platforms, such as silicon or silicon nitride, remains a significant challenge. Here, a novel silicon chip-based nonlinear Sagnac interferometer, which mainly integrates a bidirectionally pumped microring resonator with a polarization-splitting rotator, was proposed to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs. By pumping the system with a pulsed laser at 1550 nm and a power of 78 μW, polarization-entangled photon pairs in the telecom C-band were produced through spontaneous four-wave mixing, achieving a state-of-the-art brightness of 1.6 × 107 pairs s−1 GHz−1 mW−2. Using an off-chip polarization analyzer, the visibility of polarization-correlation interference fringe was measured to be 96.6%. Quantum state tomography revealed a fidelity of 0.958 for the maximally entangled state produced by the source. These exceptional performance metrics, combined with the integrability of the device, make it highly suitable for advanced quantum applications, particularly in multi-user entanglement-based quantum communication networks.

Jin Liu, Rongbin Su, Yuming Wei +8 more

Jinyi Du, Xingjian Zhang, George F. R. Chen +3 more

Transmitting entangled states over long distances is crucial for developing quantum networks. Previous demonstrations using satellites or fibers relied on photon pairs generated from bulk crystal arrangements. Polarization entanglement distribution based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon chips has long been restricted to lab-scale demonstrations spanning only a few meters due to the difficulty of achieving sufficient off-chip brightness. Here, we report a silicon chip platform that provides an off-chip entangled photon pair brightness ranging from 8,000 to 460,000 pairs per second, exceeding previous reports by 3 orders of magnitude. The entanglement fidelity reaches 99.85(6)% and 97.90(3)%, respectively. After addressing key challenges in long-distance entanglement distribution over deployed fiber, including phase drift and chromatic dispersion, entangled photons were successfully distributed over 155 km (66 dB loss). These results demonstrate that CMOS-compatible silicon chips can perform competitively with bulk crystal sources and represent an important step toward scalable, chip-based quantum networks.