Singly poled thin film lithium niobate waveguide as a tunable source of photon pairs across telecom band

TL;DR

This paper presents a design for a lithium niobate waveguide that can generate tunable, spectrally diverse photon pairs across telecom bands, useful for quantum optics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a strongly dispersive, singly poled TFLN waveguide enabling two distinct SPDC processes with a single poling period, enhancing photon pair source versatility.

Findings

Enables generation of photon pairs at 1310 nm and 1550 nm with one process.

Produces spectrally uncorrelated photon pairs at 1533 nm and 1567 nm.

Demonstrates the waveguide's strong dispersion properties compared to other platforms.

Abstract

Spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), especially in non-linear waveguides, serves as an important process to generate quantum states of light with desired properties. In this work, we report on a design of a strongly dispersive, singly poled thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) waveguide geometry which acts as a convertible source of photon pairs across telecom band with tunable spectral properties. Through our simulations, we demonstrate that by using this optimized waveguide geometry, two completely different yet desirable type II phase-matched SPDC processes are enabled using a single poling period. One process generates spectrally correlated non-degenerate photon pairs with one photon at 1310 nm (telecom O band) and the other at 1550 nm (telecom C band). The second SPDC process results in spectrally uncorrelated photon pairs in telecom C band at 1533 nm and 1567 nm respectively.We attribute this versatility of TFLN waveguide to its strong dispersion properties and make a comparative study with the existing weakly dispersive waveguide platforms. We believe that such a versatile source of photon pairs will serve as an important ingredient in various quantum optical tasks which require photons at different telecom bands and desired spectral properties.