Strongly interacting and highly entangled photons in asymmetric quantum well with resonant tunneling

TL;DR

This paper proposes an asymmetric quantum well structure that enables strong photon-photon interactions and entanglement through giant cross-Kerr nonlinearity with minimal absorption, facilitating photonic quantum gates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel asymmetric quantum well design combining resonant tunneling and an inverted-Y scheme to achieve high nonlinearity and entanglement in photons.

Findings

Giant cross-Kerr nonlinearity with low absorption achieved.

Highly entangled photons can be generated.

Photonic controlled phase gate can be constructed.

Abstract

We propose an asymmetric quantum well structure to realize strong interaction between two slow optical pulses. The linear optical properties and nonlinear optical responses associated with cross-Kerr nonlinearity are analyzed. Combining the resonant tunneling and the advantages of inverted-Y type scheme, giant cross-Kerr nonlinearity can be achieved with vanishing absorptions. Based on the unique feature, we demonstrate that highly entangled photons can be produced and photonic controlled phase gate can be constructed. In this construction, the scheme is symmetric for the probe and signal pulses. Consequently, the condition of group velocity matching can be fulfilled by adjusting the initial electron distribution.