Efficient Source of Shaped Single Photons Based on an Integrated Diamond Nanophotonic System

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly efficient, integrated diamond nanophotonic system capable of generating arbitrarily shaped single photons with high purity and efficiency, suitable for quantum communication and information processing.

Contribution

It introduces a deterministic, fiber-integrated diamond nanophotonic source of shaped single photons with high efficiency and purity, enabling advanced quantum information protocols.

Findings

Detection efficiency of 14.9%

Photon purity with $g^{(2)}(0) = 0.0168$

Streams of up to 11 single photons detected consecutively

Abstract

An efficient, scalable source of shaped single photons that can be directly integrated with optical fiber networks and quantum memories is at the heart of many protocols in quantum information science. We demonstrate a deterministic source of arbitrarily temporally shaped single-photon pulses with high efficiency (detection efficiency = 14.9%) and purity ($g^{(2)}(0) = 0.0168$) and streams of up to 11 consecutively detected single photons using a silicon-vacancy center in a highly directional fiber-integrated diamond nanophotonic cavity. Combined with previously demonstrated spin-photon entangling gates, this system enables on-demand generation of streams of correlated photons such as cluster states and could be used as a resource for robust transmission and processing of quantum information.