Toward Quantum Electronic-Photonic Systems-on-Chip: A Monolithic Source of Quantum-Correlated Photons with Integrated Frequency Locking Electronics and Pump Rejection

Imbert Wang | Josep Maria Fargas-Cabanillas | Danielus Kramnik | Anirudh Ramesh | Hayk Gevorgyan | Sidney Buchbinder | Prem Kumar | Vladimir Stojanovic | Milos Popovic

Silicon photonics has emerged as a promising candidate for implementing heralded single photon sources–a workhorse component in many optical quantum applications–due to its obvious advantages in scaling to large numbers of components. However, silicon’s relatively low third-order nonlinearity presents a dilemma–in order to generate photon pairs at a high rate, the required pump power is so high that one also generates undesirable two-photon and multi-photon events. A solution is to instead multiplex several single photon sources at low power, to obtain high total generation rates while keeping multi-photon events near zero. The major challenge to multiplexing, however, is to maintain all the individual pair sources at the same wavelength, in order to prevent quantum decoherence. Additionally, one must isolate the entangled photon pairs from the intense pump light. Pair sources with both frequency locking and high extinction pump filters are needed. In this work, we demonstrate the first electronic-photonic quantum system-on-chip (EPQSoC). This EPQSoC is aimed toward the function of a self-contained, “wall-plug” photon-pair source on chip.

Funding Sources: NSF EQuIP program grant #1842692 |  Packard Fellowship #2012-38222 | Catalyst Foundation.