Engineering spectrally unentangled photon pairs from nonlinear microring resonators through pump manipulation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel pump manipulation technique in microring resonators to generate spectrally unentangled photon pairs with high purity, advancing integrated quantum photonics capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a method using pump interference to produce spectrally unentangled photon pairs in microring resonators without spectral filtering.

Findings

Achieves photon state purity over 99% on-chip.

Uses pump interference to broaden spectral width inside the cavity.

Enables generation of high-quality heralded single photons.

Abstract

The future of integrated quantum photonics relies heavily on the ability to engineer refined methods for preparing the quantum states needed to implement various quantum protocols. An important example of such states are quantum-correlated photon pairs, which can be efficiently generated using spontaneous nonlinear processes in integrated microring-resonator structures. In this work, we propose a method for generating spectrally unentangled photon pairs from a standard microring resonator. The method utilizes interference between a primary and a delayed secondary pump pulse to effectively increase the pump spectral width inside the cavity. This enables on-chip generation of heralded single photons with state purities in excess of 99 % without spectral filtering.