The generation of high-quality entangled photon pairs has been being a long-sought goal in modern quantum communication and computation. To date, the most widely-used entangled photon pairs are generated from spontaneous parametric downconversion, a process that is intrinsically probabilistic and thus relegated to a regime of low pair-generation rates. In contrast, semiconductor quantum dots can generate triggered entangled photon pairs via a cascaded radiative decay process, and do not suffer from any fundamental trade-off between source brightness and multi-pair generation. However, a source featuring simultaneously high photon-extraction efficiency, high-degree of entanglement fidelity and photon indistinguishability has not yet been reported. Here, we present an entangled photon pair source with high brightness and indistinguishability by deterministically embedding GaAs quantum dots in broadband photonic nanostructures that enable Purcell-enhanced emission. Our source produces entangled photon pairs with a record pair collection probability of up to 0.65(4) (single-photon extraction efficiency of 0.85 (3)), entanglement fidelity of 0.88(2), and indistinguishabilities of 0.901(3) and 0.903 (3), which immediately creates opportunities for advancing quantum photonic technologies.
An optimal single-photon source should deterministically deliver one and only one photon at a time, with no trade-off between the source's efficiency and the photon indistinguishability. However, all reported solid-state sources of indistinguishable single photons had to rely on polarization filtering which reduced the efficiency by 50%, which fundamentally limited the scaling of photonic quantum technologies. Here, we overcome this final long-standing challenge by coherently driving quantum dots deterministically coupled to polarization-selective Purcell microcavities-two examples are narrowband, elliptical micropillars and broadband, elliptical Bragg gratings. A polarization-orthogonal excitation-collection scheme is designed to minimize the polarization-filtering loss under resonant excitation. We demonstrate a polarized single-photon efficiency of 0.60(2), a single-photon purity of 0.991(3), and an indistinguishability of 0.973(5). Our work provides promising solutions for truly optimal single-photon sources combining near-unity indistinguishability and near-unity system efficiency simultaneously.Single photons are appealing candidates for quantum communications 1,2 , quantumenhanced metrology 3,4 and quantum computing 5,6 . In view of the quantum information applications, the single photons are required to be controllably prepared with a high efficiency into a given quantum state. Specifically, the single photons should possess the same polarization, spatial mode, and transform-limited spectro-temporal profile for a high-visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel-type quantum interference 1,7 .Self-assembled quantum dots show so far the highest quantum efficiency among solid-state quantum emitters and thus can potentially serve as an ideal single-photon source 8-15 . There has been encouraging progress in recent years in developing highperformance single-photon sources 11 . Pulsed resonant excitation on single quantum dots has been developed to eliminate dephasing and time jitter, which created single photons with near-unity indistinguishability 15 . Further, by combining the resonant excitation with Purcell-enhanced micropillar 16,17 or photonic crystals 18,19 , the generated transform-limited 20,21 single photons have been efficiently extracted out of the bulk and funneled into a single mode at far field. Despite the recent progress 16-22 , the experimentally achieved polarized-single-photon efficiency (defined as the number of single-polarized photons extracted from the bulk semiconductor and collected by the first lens per pumping pulse) is ~33% in ref. 16 and ~15% in ref. 17, still fell short of the minimally required efficiency of 50% for boson sampling to show computational advantage to classical algorithms 23 , and was below the efficiency threshold of 67% for photon-loss-tolerant encoding in cluster-state models of optical quantum computing 24 . It should be noted that a <50% single-photon efficiency would render nearly all linear optical quantum computing schemes 1,5 not scalable.The indistinguishable single-photon...
Electrically-pumped lasers directly grown on silicon are key devices interfacing silicon microelectronics and photonics. We report here, for the first time, an electrically-pumped, room-temperature, continuous-wave (CW) and single-mode distributed feedback (DFB) laser array fabricated in InAs/GaAs quantum-dot (QD) gain material epitaxially grown on silicon. CW threshold currents as low as 12 mA and single-mode side mode suppression ratios (SMSRs) as high as 50 dB have been achieved from individual devices in the array. The laser array, compatible with state-of-the-art coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) systems, has a well-aligned channel spacing of 20±0.2 nm and exhibits a record wavelength coverage range of 100 nm, the full span of the O-band. These results indicate that, for the first time, the performance of lasers epitaxially grown on silicon is elevated to a point approaching real-world CWDM applications, demonstrating the great potential of this technology.
Single self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dots are promising bright sources of indistinguishable photons for quantum information science. However, their distribution in emission wavelength, due to inhomogeneous broadening inherent to their growth, has limited the ability to create multiple identical sources. Quantum frequency conversion can overcome this issue, particularly if implemented using scalable chip-integrated technologies. Here, we report the first demonstration of quantum frequency conversion of a quantum dot single-photon source on a silicon nanophotonic chip. Single photons from a quantum dot in a micropillar cavity are shifted in wavelength with an on-chip conversion efficiency ≈ 12 %, limited by the linewidth of the quantum dot photons. The intensity autocorrelation function g (2) (τ ) for the frequency-converted light is antibunched with g (2) (0) = 0.290 ± 0.030, compared to the before-conversion value g (2) (0) = 0.080 ± 0.003. We demonstrate the suitability of our frequency conversion interface as a resource for quantum dot sources by characterizing its effectiveness across a wide span of input wavelengths (840 nm to 980 nm), and its ability to achieve tunable wavelength shifts difficult to obtain by other approaches.
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