We propose two different setups to generate single photons on demand using an atom in front of a mirror, along with either a beam-splitter or a tunable coupling. We show that photon generation efficiency ~99% is straightforward to achieve. The proposed schemes are simple and easily tunable in frequency. The operation is relatively insensitive to dephasing and can be easily extended to generate correlated pairs of photons. They can also in principle be used to generate any photonic qubit of the form $mu |0 rangle + u |1rangle$ in arbitrary wave-packets, making them very attractive for quantum communication applications.
Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single-collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We observe a single-transverse-mode efficiency up to 0.18(2), $g^{(2)}=2.0(1.5)times10^{-4}$, and indistinguishability of 0.982(7), making this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Accounting for losses, we infer a generation probability up to 0.40(4). Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency. Finally, we introduce metrics to benchmark the performance of on-demand single-photon sources.
On-chip single-photon sources are key components for integrated photonic quantum technologies. Semiconductor quantum dots can exhibit near-ideal single-photon emission but this can be significantly degraded in on-chip geometries owing to nearby etched surfaces. A long-proposed solution to improve the indistinguishablility is by using the Purcell effect to reduce the radiative lifetime. However, until now only modest Purcell enhancements have been observed. Here we use pulsed resonant excitation to eliminate slow relaxation paths, revealing a highly Purcell-shortened radiative lifetime (22.7 ps) in a waveguide-coupled quantum dot-photonic crystal cavity system. This leads to near-lifetime-limited single-photon emission which retains high indistinguishablility (93.9%) on a timescale in which 20 photons may be emitted. Nearly background-free pulsed resonance fluorescence is achieved under $pi$-pulse excitation, enabling demonstration of an on-chip, on-demand single-photon source with very high potential repetition rates.
We report on a fast, bandwidth-tunable single-photon source based on an epitaxial GaAs quantum dot. Exploiting spontaneous spin-flip Raman transitions, single photons at $780,$nm are generated on-demand with tailored temporal profiles of durations exceeding the intrinsic quantum dot lifetime by up to three orders of magnitude. Second-order correlation measurements show a low multi-photon emission probability ($g^{2}(0)sim,0.10-0.15$) at a generation rate up to $10,$MHz. We observe Raman photons with linewidths as low as $200,$MHz, narrow compared to the $1.1,$GHz linewidth measured in resonance fluorescence. The generation of such narrow-band single photons with controlled temporal shapes at the rubidium wavelength is a crucial step towards the development of an optimized hybrid semiconductor-atom interface.
We demonstrate the generation and demultiplexing of quantum correlated photons on a monolithic photonic chip composed of silicon and silica-based waveguides. Photon pairs generated in a nonlinear silicon waveguide are successfully separated into two optical channels of an arrayed-waveguide grating fabricated on a silica-based waveguide platform.
We demonstrate and evaluate an on-demand source of single itinerant microwave photons. Photons are generated using a highly coherent, fixed-frequency qubit-cavity system, and a protocol where the microwave control field is far detuned from the photon emission frequency. By using a Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA), we perform efficient single-quadrature detection of the state emerging from the cavity. We characterize the imperfections of the photon generation and detection, including detection inefficiency and state infidelity caused by measurement backaction over a range of JPA gains from 17 to 33 dB. We observe that both detection efficiency and undesirable backaction increase with JPA gain. We find that the density matrix has its maximum single photon component $rho_{11} = 0.36 pm 0.01$ at 29 dB JPA gain. At this gain, backaction of the JPA creates cavity photon number fluctuations that we model as a thermal distribution with an average photon number $bar{n} = 0.041 pm 0.003$.