Heralded pure single-photon sources using nanophotonic waveguides with quadratic and cubic nonlinearities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel integrated approach for pure heralded single-photon sources using nanophotonic waveguides with nonlinearities, enhancing spectral purity and enabling room-temperature on-chip detectors for quantum photonics.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive quantum model exploiting nonlinear interactions in nanophotonic waveguides to improve photon purity and relax design constraints.

Findings

Significant improvement in spectral purity of photon pairs.

Relaxation of structural and pump wavelength restrictions.

Potential for room-temperature on-chip photon detectors.

Abstract

This paper presents, to our knowledge, a new approach in developing integrated pure heralded single-photon sources based on the interplay between the spontaneous four-wave mixing and sum-frequency generation parametric processes. We introduce a comprehensive quantum model to exploit this interplay in AlGaAs and LiNbO$_3$ nanophotonic waveguides. The developed model is used to assess the performance of the sources based on the photon-pair generation and the associated spectral purity. We find that this approach can remarkably improve the spectral purity of low-pure generated photon pairs, relaxing the restrictions on the structure design and the used pump wavelength. In addition, it overcomes the current hurdles in implementing on-chip photon detectors operating at room temperature, paving the way for advanced applications in integrated quantum photonics and information processing.