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Optics Express

Chip-scale high spectral purity micro-ring photon-pair source based on dual-pulse control

Baojie Hou, Donghui Chen, Haoran Ma, Zichao Zhao, Qishen Liang, Bin Zhang, Liao Ye, Qikai Huang, Denghui Wang, Tingge Dai, Yuehai Wang, Huihui Zhu, Jianyi Yang

Published Mar 12, 2026• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Fully integrated high spectral purity photon-pair sources represent critical core components for scalable photonic quantum information processing systems. While micro-ring resonator based single-photon sources demonstrate superior integration capabilities, their spectral purity typically suffers from a theoretical upper bound below 92% in the absence of narrow-band spectral filtering, rendering it inadequate for advanced quantum applications. This work successfully implements an on-chip dual-pulse controlled photon pair generation architecture on a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible silicon photonic platform, achieving high spectral purity exceeding 98% by optimizing the beam splitting ratio and adjusting the relative time delay between the two pulses. Furthermore, to mitigate operating point drift in the micro-ring photon-pair generator induced by micro-heater current variations during testing, we developed a power control algorithm that locks the micro-ring resonance to the corresponding frequency of the shaped optical pulse, significantly improving long-term system stability.

DOI
10.1364/oe.589347

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Fully integrated high spectral purity photon-pair sources represent critical core components for scalable photonic quantum information processing systems. While micro-ring resonator based single-photon sources demonstrate superior integration capabilities, their spectral purity typically suffers from a theoretical upper bound below 92% in the absence of narrow-band spectral filtering, rendering it inadequate for advanced quantum applications. This work successfully implements an on-chip dual-pulse controlled photon pair generation architecture on a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible silicon photonic platform, achieving high spectral purity exceeding 98% by optimizing the beam splitting ratio and adjusting the relative time delay between the two pulses. Furthermore, to mitigate operating point drift in the micro-ring photon-pair generator induced by micro-heater current variations during testing, we developed a power control algorithm that locks the micro-ring resonance to the corresponding frequency of the shaped optical pulse, significantly improving long-term system stability.
We experimentally demonstrate a high-spectral-purity photon source by designing a dual-Mach–Zehnder-interferometer-coupled silicon ring resonator, wherein the linewidths of pump and signal (idler) resonances can be engineered independently. A high spectral purity of 95 % ± 1.5 % is obtained via a time-integrated g ( 2 ) correlation measurement, which exceeds the theoretical 93% bound of a traditional ring’s spontaneous four-wave-mixing photon source. This source also possesses high performance in other metrics including a measured coincidence of 9599 pairs/s and a preparation heralding efficiency of 52.4% at a relatively low pump power of 61 µW as well as high drop-to-through suppression of 20.2 dB. By overcoming the trade-off between spectral purity and brightness in the post-filtering way, such a method guarantees bright pure photons and will pave the way for development of on-chip quantum information processing with improved operation fidelity and efficiency.
Recently, many researchers focus on the integration of single photon sources on an optical chip toward the realization of large-scale quantum information processing.Identical single photons are required to obtain good interference between photons for quantum information processing, for which high "spectral purity" of single photons is required.An appealing scheme is employing the spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in a silicon micro-ring resonator (MRR) because it allows us to generate high-purity photons without external spectral filters.However, the purity value is limited to 0.92 due to the dispersion property of an MRR We have developed a new scheme to further increase the spectral purity from an MRR by manipulating the spectral phase distribution of the pump pulse.Via exploring several strategies on the spectral phase modulation, we found that the purity of single photon can be increased up to approximately 0.96 breaking the conventional limitation of 0.92 in a standard MRR.We further explore the experimental feasibility of the scheme toward future implementation.
One of the key building blocks of quantum photonic systems is a source of indistinguishable photons. Silicon ring resonators can be used as photon pair sources by taking advantage of silicon's large third order nonlinearity with a process known as spontaneous four wave mixing. These sources are capable of producing pairs of indistinguishable photons but typically suffer from an effective 50% loss. By slightly decoupling the input waveguide from the ring, the desired photons generated in the ring can be directed to the drop port. Thus, the ratio between the coincidences from the drop port and the total number of coincidences from all ports (coincidence efficiency) can be significantly increased, with the trade-off being that the pump is less efficiently coupled into the ring. This asymmetric coupling scheme was used to demonstrate a dual-bus microring source with a coincidence efficiency of ~96%. Unfortunately, the penalty to pump power was quite large, with a required ~10x increase in the pump power to maintain the same pair generation rate.\nTo further improve upon this result, a microring source was designed with multipoint evanescent couplers to induce a strong spectral dependence in the coupling coefficients. This coupler design can be used on both sides of the ring resonator so that resonances supported by one of the couplers are suppressed by the other. This is the ideal configuration for a ring-based photon-pair source as it can only support the pump photons at the input side while only allowing the generated photons to leave through the output side. Asymmetric coupling was also used in this configuration but in a different way than in the previous source. In this case, the input side of the ring was configured to be critically coupled for maximal resonance enhancement while the output side was configured to be over coupled to minimize photon-pair loss within the ring. This device design was used to demonstrate a photon-pair source with coincidence efficiencies of 0.9981+-6.425x10^-4 and 0.9979+-1.665x10^-3 for degenerate and non-degenerate pump configuration respectively.\nIn addition to the source development, work was done to move some of the pump rejection filtering onto the photonic chip. While the fabricated device only exhibited an extinction of 50 dB, the root cause of the limited extinction was explored and a new filter design was proposed to overcome these limitations. With the combination of the microring source with its greatly improved efficiency and the movement toward reducing the required off-chip filtering, this work represents a significant advancement in the scalability of integrated quantum photonic systems which can enable high performance quantum computing and communication systems.
Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC)s are a promising contender for quantum information technologies. The spectral purity of photons is one of the key attributes of PIC photon-pair sources. The dual-pulse pump manipulation technique [1] showed >99% purity in ring-resonator photon-pair sources. Here, we have developed a PIC to shape a pulse into dual, triple and quadruple pulses and investigated the effect of these pump pulse configurations on the purity. Our results show that more complex configurations over dual-pulse do not result in comparatively higher purity but allow accurate control over choosing arbitrary values of the purity.
Integrated quantum photonics relies critically on the purity, scalability, integrability, and flexibility of a photon source to support diverse quantum functionalities on a single chip. Here we report a chip-scale photon-pair source on the silicon-on-insulator platform that utilizes dramatic cavity-enhanced four-wave mixing in a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator. The device is able to produce high-quality photon pairs at different wavelengths with a high spectral brightness of 6.24×10(7) pairs/s/mW(2)/GHz and photon-pair correlation with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio of 1386 ± 278 while pumped with a continuous-wave laser. The superior performance, together with the structural compactness and CMOS compatibility, opens up a great avenue towards quantum silicon photonics with capability of multi-channel parallel information processing for both integrated quantum computing and long-haul quantum communication.