Manipulation of a two-photon pump in superconductor - semiconductor heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper explores how a superconducting pn-junction can be used as an electrically-driven photon source, where the photon statistics, entanglement, and squeezing are controllable via superconducting phase differences, revealing new quantum light manipulation methods.

Contribution

It demonstrates the manipulation of photon entanglement and squeezing through superconducting phase control in a superconductor-semiconductor heterostructure, a novel approach in quantum photonics.

Findings

Generation of correlated and entangled photon pairs.

Squeezing of quadrature fluctuations can be controlled by superconducting phase.

Superconducting coherence influences two-photon quantum states.

Abstract

We investigate the photon statistics, entanglement and squeezing of a pn-junction sandwiched between two superconducting leads, and show that such an electrically-driven photon pump generates correlated and entangled pairs of photons. In particular, we demonstrate that the squeezing of the fluctuations in the quadrature amplitudes of the emitted light can be manipulated by changing the relative phase of the order parameters of the superconductors. This reveals how macroscopic coherence of the superconducting state can be used to tailor the properties of a two-photon state.