On-chip quantum interference between silicon photon-pair sources

By Joshua W. Silverstone, Damien Bonneau, K. Ohira, N. Suzuki, H. Yoshida, N. Iizuka, M. Ezaki, Chandra M. Natarajan, Michael G. Tanner, Robert H. Hadfield and 5 more. Nature Photonics, 2013

541 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Large-scale integrated quantum photonic technologies1,2 will require on-chip integration of identical photon sources with reconfigurable waveguide circuits. Relatively complex quantum circuits have been demonstrated already1,2,3,4,5,6,7, but few studies acknowledge the pressing need to integrate photon sources and waveguide circuits together on-chip8,9. A key step towards such large-scale quantum technologies is the integration of just two individual photon sources within a waveguide circuit, and the demonstration of high-visibility quantum interference between them. Here, we report a silicon-on-insulator device that combines two four-wave mixing sources in an interferometer with a reconfigurable phase shifter. We configured the device to create and manipulate two-colour (non-degenerate) or same-colour (degenerate) path-entangled or path-unentangled photon pairs. We observed up to 100.0 ± 0.4% visibility quantum interference on-chip, and up to 95 ± 4% off-chip. Our device removes the need for external photon sources, provides a path to increasing the complexity of quantum photonic circuits and is a first step towards fully integrated quantum technologies. A silicon-on-insulator device combining two four-wave-mixing photon-pair sources in an interferometer with a reconfigurable phase shifter is used to create and manipulate non-degenerate or degenerate, path-entangled or path-unentangled photon pairs. A quantum interference visibility of nearly 100% is observed on-chip. This device is a first step towards fully integrated quantum technologies.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc2bd35ea48f485d08cc2878e78619c546aed6ec

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Citations in the corpus

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (2018, background): “Several groups are attempting to do so by severalmeans, either by using confined light into optical fibres [45], in silicon-on-insulator waveguides [46] but also by careful engineering of semiconductor Bragg-type of structure in order to obtain parametric down-conversion directly on an optical chip ”
Silicon Quantum Photonics (2015, background): “4d), in a phase stable interferometer with [45] (Fig.”
Large-scale quantum photonic circuits in silicon (2016, background): “[42, 49, 75, 76], slow-light photonic crystal structures [50, 77–79], and microring resonators [38, 41, 43, 80–88]; see Figure 5D–F.”
Integrated photonic quantum technologies (2019, background): “g with photons [91–95], simulation of Anderson localizations with entangled photons [104], near-optimal single-photons generation from a single QD [52], integration of SFWM-SPSs with quantum circuits [25], high-efficiency QD source in waveguide [55], quantum simulation of molecular ground-state [79]”
Why I am optimistic about the silicon-photonic route to quantum computing (2016, methodology): “This is because we can use the small nonlinearity of the semiconductor itself and obtain heralded single photons by pulsed pumping of long waveguides, or of waveguide cavities [4, 56, 57].”