Parasitic Photon-Pair Suppression via Photonic Stop-Band Engineering

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to suppress unwanted photon pairs in nonlinear optical sources by engineering photonic stop bands, significantly improving the quality of generated photon pairs for quantum applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to suppress photon-pair generation using photonic stop-band engineering, enhancing control over photon frequency correlations.

Findings

Suppression of photon-pair generation through field modification of one photon.

Significant increase in coincidence to accidental ratio in the modified spectrum.

Potential for improved photon-pair frequency correlation engineering.

Abstract

We calculate that an appropriate modification of the field associated with only one of the photons of a photon pair can suppress generation of the pair entirely. From this general result, we develop a method for suppressing the generation of undesired photon pairs utilizing photonic stop bands. For a third-order nonlinear optical source of frequency-degenerate photons we calculate the modified frequency spectrum (joint spectral intensity) and show a significant increase in a standard metric, the coincidence to accidental ratio. These results open a new avenue for photon-pair frequency correlation engineering.