Optical resonator made with photonic wire and mirrors performs with excellent single-photon purity, pointing to potential for nanopost designs in scalable quantum applications.
Superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs) are a highly promising emerging photon counting technology, offering infrared sensitivity combined with low dark count rates and sub-100 ps timing jitter [1]. These devices are under consideration for a wide variety of photon counting applications, from quantum cryptography to remote sensing. Next generation device designs based on optical cavities, ultra narrow wires, parallel wire arrays and nano-antenna enhanced devices are being evaluated to meet the demands of advanced photon counting applications.
The practical prospect of quantum communication and information processing relies on sophisticated single-photon pairs, which feature a controllable waveform, narrow spectrum, excellent purity, fiber compatibility, and miniaturized design. For practical realizations, stable, miniaturized, low-cost devices are required. Sources with one or some of the above characteristics have already been demonstrated, but it is quite challenging to obtain a source with all of the described characteristics simultaneously. Here we report on an integrated single-longitudinal-mode, non-degenerate, narrowband photon pair source that exhibits all the requirements needed for quantum applications. The device is composed of a periodically poled, Ti-indiffused, lithium niobate waveguide with high reflective dielectric mirror coatings deposited on the waveguide end-faces. Photon pairs with wavelengths around 890 and 1320 nm are generated via type II phase-matched parametric down-conversion (PDC). Clustering in this dispersive cavity restricts the whole conversion spectrum to one single-longitudinal mode in a single cluster, yielding a narrow bandwidth of only 60 MHz. The high conversion efficiency in the waveguide, together with the spectral clustering in the doubly resonant waveguide, leads to a high brightness of pairs/(s mW MHz). This source exhibits prominent single-longitudinal-mode purity and remarkable temporal shaping capability. In particular, due to temporal broadening, we can observe that the coherence time of the two-photon component of the PDC state is actually longer than that of the single-photon states. The miniaturized monolithic design enables this source to have various fiber communication applications.
Abstract Microring resonators (MRRs) are extensively utilized in photonic chips for generating quantum light sources and enabling high-efficiency nonlinear frequency conversion. However, conventional microrings are typically optimized for a single specific function, limiting their versatility in multifunctional applications. In this work, we propose a reconfigurable microring resonator architecture designed to accommodate diverse application requirements. By integrating a cascaded Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) as the microring coupler, the design enables independent control of the quality factors for pump, signal and idler photons through two tunable phase shifters. This capability allows for dynamic tuning and optimization of critical performance parameters, including photon-pair generation rate (PGR), spectral purity and single photon heralding efficiency (HE). The proposed structure is implemented on a silicon photonic chip, and experimental results exhibit a wide range of tunability for these parameters, with excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. This flexible and multi-functional design offers a promising pathway for high-performance, highly integrated on-chip quantum information processing systems.