In-situ wavelength tuning of quantum-dot single-photon sources integrated on a CMOS silicon chip

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel in-situ wavelength tuning method for quantum-dot single-photon sources integrated on a CMOS silicon chip, enabling scalable quantum photonic circuits with matched photon sources.

Contribution

It introduces a transfer printing technique with optically driven heating pads for in-situ wavelength tuning of integrated quantum-dot single-photon sources on silicon chips.

Findings

Successful in-situ wavelength tuning of quantum dots on a silicon chip.

Achieved wavelength matching between dissimilar quantum-dot sources.

Simplified fabrication of 3D photonic structures using transfer printing.

Abstract

Silicon quantum photonics provides a promising pathway to realize large-scale quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) by exploiting the power of complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Toward scalable operation of such silicon-based QPICs, a straightforward approach is to integrate deterministic single-photon sources (SPSs). To this end, hybrid integration of deterministic solid-state SPSs, such as those based on InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs), is highly promising. However, the spectral and spatial randomness inherent in the QDs pose a serious challenge for scalable implementation of multiple identical SPSs on a silicon CMOS chip. To overcome this challenge, we have been investigating a new hybrid integration technique called transfer printing, which is based on a pick-and-place operation and allows for the integration of desired QD SPSs on any locations on the silicon CMOS chips at will. Nevertheless, even in this scenario, in-situ fine tuning for perfect wavelength matching among the integrated QD SPSs will be required for interfering photons from the dissimilar sources. Here, we demonstrate in-situ wavelength tuning of QD SPSs integrated on a CMOS silicon chip. To thermally tune the emission wavelengths of the integrated QDs, we augmented the QD SPSs with optically driven heating pads. The integration of all the necessary elements was performed using transfer printing, which largely simplified the fabrication of the three-dimensional stack of micro/nanophotonic structures. We further demonstrate in-situ wavelength matching between two dissimilar QD sources integrated on the same silicon chip. Our transfer-printing-based approach will open the possibility for realizing large-scale QPICs that leverage CMOS technology.