Towards optimal single-photon sources from polarized microcavities
Abstract
An optimal single-photon source should deterministically deliver one, and only one, photon at a time, with no trade-off between the source’s efficiency and the photon indistinguishability. However, all reported solid-state sources of indistinguishable single photons had to rely on polarization filtering, which reduced the efficiency by 50%, fundamentally limiting the scaling of photonic quantum technologies. Here, we overcome this long-standing challenge by coherently driving quantum dots deterministically coupled to polarization-selective Purcell microcavities. We present two examples: narrowband, elliptical micropillars and broadband, elliptical Bragg gratings. A polarization-orthogonal excitation–collection scheme is designed to minimize the polarization filtering loss under resonant excitation. We demonstrate a polarized single-photon efficiency of 0.60 ± 0.02 (0.56 ± 0.02), a single-photon purity of 0.975 ± 0.005 (0.991 ± 0.003) and an indistinguishability of 0.975 ± 0.006 (0.951 ± 0.005) for the micropillar (Bragg grating) device. Our work provides promising solutions for truly optimal single-photon sources combining near-unity indistinguishability and near-unity system efficiency simultaneously.
Citation
Wang , H , He , Y-M , Chung , T-H , Hu , H , Yu , Y , Chen , S , Ding , X , Chen , M-C , Qin , J , Yang , X , Liu , R-Z , Duan , Z-C , Li , J-P , Gerhardt , S , Winkler , K , Jurkat , J , Wang , L-J , Gregersen , N , Huo , Y-H , Dai , Q , Yu , S , Höfling , S , Lu , C-Y & Pan , J-W 2019 , ' Towards optimal single-photon sources from polarized microcavities ' , Nature Photonics . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0494-3
Publication
Nature Photonics
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1749-4885Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2019, the Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher's policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0494-3
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