We have designed and fabricated a set of AlGaAs multilayer waveguides, which can serve as a source of entangled photons at 1.55 mu m through parametric fluorescence. In our scheme two counterpropagating, orthogonally polarized signal/idler modes are nonlinearly generated by a pump wave impinging on the upper surface of the waveguide. To check the compliance with design specifications on phase-matching wavelength and parametric gain, we have systematically measured effective indices and surface-emitting second-harmonic generation, respectively. This characterization allowed us to single out a nominal sample with optimum performances, which we numerically modeled for counterpropagating parametric fluorescence. We predict a pair generation efficiency eta(PF)=4x10(-13) (signal photons per pump photon). For a 1 W (peak), 100 ns pump pulse at normal incidence, this corresponds to about 14 photons per dark count with state-of-the-art avalanche photodiodes
A large number of scientific proposals made in the last few years are based on transport and manipulation of information using single quantum objects. Some of them make use of entanglement in pairs of particles such as twin photons.Although theoretical proposals have demonstrated highly interesting perspectives in the quantum information domain, experimental realizations and applications still suffer from the complexity of experimental set-ups and technological limitations. This paper presents various approaches aiming at efficient twin photon semiconductor sources. The emergence of these compact and integrated devices would be an important technological breakthrough in quantum information applications.
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