No Arabic abstract
We present rigorous and intuitive master equation models to study on-demand single photon sources from pulse-excited quantum dots coupled to cavities. We consider three methods of source excitation: resonant pi-pulse, off-resonant phonon-assisted inversion, and two-photon excitation of a biexciton-exciton cascade, and investigate the effect of the pulse excitation process on the quantum indistinguishability, efficiency, and purity of emitted photons. By explicitly modelling the time-dependent pulsed excitation process in a manner which captures non-Markovian effects associated with coupling to photon and phonon reservoirs, we find that photons of near-unity indistinguishability can be emitted with over 90% efficiency for all these schemes, with the off-resonant schemes not necessarily requiring polarization filtering due to the frequency separation of the excitation pulse, and allowing for very high single photon purities. Furthermore, the off-resonant methods are shown to be robust over certain parameter regimes, with less stringent requirements on the excitation pulse duration in particular. We also derive a semi-analytical simplification of our master equation for the off-resonant drive, which gives insight into the important role that exciton-phonon decoupling for a strong drive plays in the off-resonant phonon-assisted inversion process
We present experimental and theoretical study of single semiconductor quantum dots excited by two non-degenerate, resonantly tuned variably polarized lasers. The first laser is tuned to excitonic resonances. Depending on its polarization it photogenerates a coherent single exciton state. The second laser is tuned to biexciton resonances. By scanning the energy of the second laser for various polarizations of the two lasers, while monitoring the emission from the biexciton and exciton spectral lines, we map the biexciton photoluminescence excitation spectra. The resonances rich spectra of the second photon absorption are analyzed and fully understood in terms of a many carrier theoretical model which takes into account the direct and exchange Coulomb interactions between the quantum confined carriers.
In this letter, we present a detailed, all optical study of the influence of different excitation schemes on the indistinguishability of single photons from a single InAs quantum dot. For this study, we measure the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of consecutive photons from the spontaneous emission of an InAs quantum dot state under various excitation schemes and different excitation conditions and give a comparison.
An ideal source of entangled photon pairs combines the perfect symmetry of an atom with the convenient electrical trigger of light sources based on semiconductor quantum dots. We create a naturally symmetric quantum dot cascade that emits highly entangled photon pairs on demand. Our source consists of strain-free GaAs dots self-assembled on a triangular symmetric (111)A surface. The emitted photons strongly violate Bells inequality and reveal a fidelity to the Bell state as high as 86 (+-2) % without postselection. This result is an important step towards scalable quantum-communication applications with efficient sources.
An optimal single-photon source should deterministically deliver one and only one photon at a time, with no trade-off between the sources 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%, which fundamentally limited the scaling of photonic quantum technologies. Here, we overcome this final long-standing challenge by coherently driving quantum dots deterministically coupled to polarization-selective Purcell microcavities--two examples are 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.
We employ active feedback to stabilize the frequency of single photons emitted by two separate quantum dots to an atomic standard. The transmission of a single, rubidium-based Faraday filter serves as the error signal for frequency stabilization to less than 1.5% of the emission linewidth. Long-term stability is demonstrated by Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between photons from the two quantum dots. The observed visibility of $V_{mathrm{lock}}=(41 pm 5)$% is limited only by internal dephasing of the dots. Our approach facilitates quantum networks with indistinguishable photons from distributed emitters.