Experimental generation of single photons via active multiplexing

By Xiao-song Ma, S. Zotter, Johannes Kofler, T. Jennewein, Anton Zeilinger. 2010

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An on-demand single-photon source is a fundamental building block in quantum science and technology. We experimentally demonstrate the proof of concept for a scheme to generate on-demand single photons via actively multiplexing several heralded photons probabilistically produced from pulsed spontaneous parametric down-conversions (SPDCs). By utilizing a four-photon-pair source, an active feed-forward technique, and an ultrafast single-photon router, we show a fourfold enhancement of the output photon rate. Simultaneously, we maintain the quality of the output single-photon states, confirmed by correlation measurements. We also experimentally verify, via Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, that the router does not affect the indistinguishability of the single photons. Furthermore, we give numerical simulations, which indicate that photons based on multiplexing of four SPDC sources can outperform the heralding based on highly advanced photon-number-resolving detectors. Our results show a route for on-demand single-photon generation and the practical realization of scalable linear optical quantum-information processing.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/499c500a992b8458faf8618b44e54e60994282fb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

On-chip quantum interference between silicon photon-pair sources (2013, methodology): “[32] Ma, X.”
Metrology of single-photon sources and detectors: a review (2014, methodology): “55-μm source using a fast shutter to suppress background counts,(27) and multiplexing of four sources to provide a high output rate while suppressing multiphoton states.(28) Spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) is a χð3Þ nonlinear process, where two pump photons create the pair of downconverted photo”
Large-scale quantum photonic circuits in silicon (2016, background): “In addition to temporal-multiplexing schemes, spatial-multiplexing schemes have been proposed [99, 100] and demonstrated [50, 101] in order to reduce the probability of multipair emission events, which reduce the determinism of χ2- and χ3-based single-photon sources.”