No Arabic abstract
Photonic quantum technologies such as quantum cryptography, photonic quantum metrology, photonic quantum simulators and computers will largely benefit from highly scalable and small footprint quantum photonic circuits. To perform fully on-chip quantum photonic operations, three basic building blocks are required: single-photon sources, photonic circuits and single-photon detectors. Highly integrated quantum photonic chips on silicon and related platforms have been demonstrated incorporating only one or two of these basic building blocks. Previous implementations of all three components were mainly limited by laser stray light, making temporal filtering necessary or required complex manipulation to transfer all components onto one chip. So far, a monolithic, simultaneous implementation of all elements demonstrating single-photon operation remains elusive. Here, we present a fully-integrated Hanbury-Brown and Twiss setup on a micron-sized footprint, consisting of a GaAs waveguide embedding quantum dots as single-photon sources, a waveguide beamsplitter and two superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors. This enables a second-order correlation measurement at the single-photon level under both continuous-wave and pulsed resonant excitation.
Nano- and micromechanical solid-state quantum devices have become a focus of attention. Reliably generating nonclassical states of their motion is of interest both for addressing fundamental questions about macroscopic quantum phenomena and for developing quantum technologies in the domains of sensing and transduction. We used quantum optical control techniques to conditionally generate single-phonon Fock states of a nanomechanical resonator. We performed a Hanbury Brown and Twiss-type experiment that verified the nonclassical nature of the phonon state without requiring full state reconstruction. Our result establishes purely optical quantum control of a mechanical oscillator at the single-phonon level.
We demonstrate a monolithic III-V photonic circuit combining a heralded single photon source with a beamsplitter, at room temperature and telecom wavelength. Pulsed parametric down-conversion in an AlGaAs waveguide generates counterpropagating photons, one of which is used to herald the injection of its twin into the beamsplitter. We use this configuration to implement an integrated Hanbury-Brown and Twiss experiment, yielding a heralded second-order correlation $g^{(2)}_{rm her}(0)=0.10 pm 0.02$ that confirms single-photon operation. The demonstrated generation and manipulation of quantum states on a single III-V semiconductor chip opens promising avenues towards real-world applications in quantum information.
Single-photon counters are single-pixel binary devices that click upon the absorption of a photon but obscure its spectral information, whereas resolving the colour of detected photons has been in critical demand for frontier astronomical observation, spectroscopic imaging and wavelength division multiplexed quantum communications. Current implementations of single-photon spectrometers either consist of bulky wavelength-scanning components or have limited detection channels, preventing parallel detection of broadband single photons with high spectral resolutions. Here, we present the first broadband chip-scale single-photon spectrometer covering both visible and infrared wavebands spanning from 600nm to 2000nm. The spectrometer integrates an on-chip dispersive echelle grating with a single-element propagating superconducting nanowire detector of ultraslow-velocity for mapping the dispersed photons with high spatial resolutions. The demonstrated on-chip single-photon spectrometer features small device footprint, high robustness with no moving parts and meanwhile offers more than 200 equivalent wavelength detection channels with further scalability.
Anyons, particles displaying a fractional exchange statistics intermediate between bosons and fermions, play a central role in the fractional quantum Hall effect and various spin lattice models, and have been proposed for topological quantum computing schemes due to their resilience to noise. Here we use parametric down-conversion in an integrated semiconductor chip to generate biphoton states simulating anyonic particle statistics, in a reconfigurable manner. Our scheme exploits the frequency entanglement of the photon pairs, which is directly controlled through the spatial shaping of the pump beam. These results, demonstrated at room temperature and telecom wavelength on a chip-integrated platform, pave the way to the practical implementation of quantum simulation tasks with tailored particle statistics.
High-dimensional entangled states of light provide novel possibilities for quantum information, from fundamental tests of quantum mechanics to enhanced computation and communication protocols. In this context, the frequency degree of freedom combines the assets of robustness to propagation and easy handling with standard telecommunication components. Here we use an integrated semiconductor chip to engineer the wavefunction and exchange statistics of frequency-entangled photon pairs directly at the generation stage, without post-manipulation. Tuning the spatial properties of the pump beam allows to generate frequency-anticorrelated, correlated and separable states, and to control the symmetry of the spectral wavefunction to induce either bosonic or fermionic behaviors. These results, supported by analytical and numerical calculations, open promising perspectives for the quantum simulation of fermionic problems with photons on an integrated platform, as well as for communication and computation protocols exploiting antisymmetric high-dimensional quantum states.