Near-transform-limited single photons from an efficient solid-state quantum emitter

Abstract

By pulsed s-shell resonant excitation of a single quantum dot-micropillar system, we generate long streams of 1000 near-transform-limited single photons with high mutual indistinguishability. The Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of two photons is measured as a function of their emission time separation varying from 13 ns to 14.7 μs, where the visibility slightly drops from 95.9(2)% to a plateau of 92.1(5)% through a slow dephasing process occurring at a time scale of 0.7 μs. A temporal and spectral analysis reveals the pulsed resonance fluorescence single photons are close to the transform limit, which are readily useful for multiphoton entanglement and interferometry experiments.