Mitigating indistinguishability issues in photon pair sources by delayed-pump Intermodal Four Wave Mixing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method combining waveguide tapering and pump delay control in intermodal four wave mixing to enhance spectral indistinguishability of photon pairs, addressing fabrication imperfections in integrated quantum photonics.

Contribution

It demonstrates a tunable approach to recover spectral indistinguishability in photon sources despite fabrication errors, achieving over 99.5% indistinguishability.

Findings

Achieves >99.5% indistinguishability between independent sources.

Predicts maximum Heralded Hong Ou Mandel visibility degradation <0.35%.

Provides a practical solution for fabrication imperfections in integrated quantum photonics.

Abstract

Large arrays of independent, pure and identical heralded single photon sources are ubiquitous in today's Noise Intermediate Scale Quantum devices (NISQ). In the race towards the development of increasingly ideal sources, delayed-pump Intermodal Four Wave Mixing (IFWM) in multimode waveguides has recently demonstrated record performances in all these metrics, becoming a benchmark for spontaneous sources in integrated optics. Despite this, fabrication imperfections still spoil the spectral indistinguishability of photon pairs from independent sources. Here we show that by tapering the width of the waveguide and by controlling the delay between the pump pulses, we add spectral tunability to the source while still inheriting all the record metrics of the IFWM scheme. This feature is used to recover spectral indistinuishability in presence of fabrication errors. Under realistic tolerances on the waveguide dimensions, we predict >99.5% indistinguishability between independent sources on the same chip, and a maximum degradation of the Heralded Hong Ou Mandel visibility <0.35 %.