A silicon-chip source of bright photon-pair comb

TL;DR

This paper presents a silicon-on-insulator microdisk resonator that generates high-brightness, high-purity photon pairs efficiently on a chip, advancing integrated quantum photonics capabilities.

Contribution

It demonstrates a monolithic silicon microdisk device with cavity-enhanced four-wave mixing producing bright, pure photon pairs suitable for scalable quantum photonics applications.

Findings

Spectral brightness of $6.24 imes 10^7$ pairs/s/mW^2/GHz achieved

Photon-pair correlation with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio of 1386

Device operates with continuous-wave laser pumping

Abstract

Integrated quantum photonics relies critically on the purity, scalability, integrability, and flexibility of a photon source to support diverse quantum functionalities on a single chip. Up to date, it remains an open challenge to realize an efficient monolithic photon-pair source for on-chip application. Here we report a device on the silicon-on-insulator platform that utilizes dramatic cavity enhanced four-wave mixing in a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator. The device is able to produce high-purity photon pairs in a comb fashion, with an unprecedented spectral brightness of $6.24 \times 10^7 {\rm pair/s/mW^2/GHz}$ and photon-pair correlation with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio of $1386 \pm 278$ while pumped with a continuous-wave laser. The superior performance, together with the structural compactness and CMOS compatibility, opens up a great avenue towards quantum silicon photonics with unprecedented capability of multi-channel parallel information processing for both integrated quantum computing and long-haul quantum communication.