Compact engineering of path-entangled sources from a monolithic quadratic nonlinear photonic crystal

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a compact, integrated photonic source for generating steerable path-entangled states using a monolithic quadratic nonlinear photonic crystal, advancing miniaturized quantum light sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel monolithic nonlinear photonic crystal that inherently acts as a beam splitter to produce path-entangled photon states in a compact form.

Findings

Successfully generated heralded single-photon path-entanglement.

Demonstrated quantum spatial beatings as a signature of entanglement.

Potential for extending to high-dimensional and multi-photon entangled states.

Abstract

Photonic entangled states lie at the heart of quantum science for the demonstrations of quantum mechanics foundations and supply as a key resource for approaching various quantum technologies. An integrated realization of such states will certainly guarantee a high-degree of entanglement and improve the performance like portability, stability and miniaturization, hence becomes an inevitable tendency towards the integrated quantum optics. Here, we report the compact realization of steerable photonic path-entangled states from a monolithic quadratic nonlinear photonic crystal. The crystal acts as an inherent beam splitter to distribute photons into coherent spatial modes, producing the heralded single-photon even appealing beamlike two-photon path-entanglement, wherein the entanglement is characterized by quantum spatial beatings. Such multifunctional entangled source can be further extended to high-dimensional fashion and multi-photon level as well as involved with other degrees of freedom, which paves a desirable way to engineer miniaturized quantum light source.