No Arabic abstract
Using a general Hamiltonian treatment, we theoretically study the generation of degenerate quadrature squeezing in a dual-pumped integrated microring resonator coupled to a waveguide. Considering a dual-pump four-wave mixing configuration in an integrated $text{Si}_3text{N}_4$ platform, and following the coupled-mode theory approach, we investigate the effects of parasitic quantum nonlinear optical processes on the generation of squeezed light. Considering five resonance modes in this approach allows us to include the most important four-wave mixing processes involved in such a configuration. We theoretically explore the effects of the pump detunings on different nonlinear processes and show that the effects of some of the parasitic processes are effectively neutralized by symmetrically detuning the two pumps. This yields a significant enhancement in the output squeezing quality without physically changing the structure, but suffers from the trade-off of requiring substantially higher pump power for a fixed target level of squeezing.
We consider pulsed-pump spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) as well as pulsed single- and dual-pump spontaneous four-wave mixing processes in waveguides within a unified Hamiltonian theoretical framework. Working with linear operator equations in $k$-space, our approach allows inclusion of linear losses, self- and cross-phase modulation, and dispersion to any order. We describe state evolution in terms of second-order moments, for which we develop explicit expressions. We use our approach to calculate the joint spectral amplitude of degenerate squeezing using SPDC analytically in the perturbative limit, benchmark our theory against well-known results in the limit of negligible group velocity dispersion, and study the suitability of recently proposed sources for quantum sampling experiments.
We calculate that an appropriate modification of the field associated with only one of the photons of a photon pair can suppress generation of the pair entirely. From this general result, we develop a method for suppressing the generation of undesired photon pairs utilizing photonic stop bands. For a third-order nonlinear optical source of frequency-degenerate photons we calculate the modified frequency spectrum (joint spectral intensity) and show a significant increase in a standard metric, the coincidence to accidental ratio. These results open a new avenue for photon-pair frequency correlation engineering.
We consider integrated photon pair sources based on spontaneous four-wave mixing and derive expressions for the pump powers at which various nonlinear processes become relevant for a variety of source materials and structures. These expressions serve as rules of thumb in identifying reasonable parameter regimes for the design of such sources. We demonstrate that if pump powers are kept low enough to suppress cross-phase modulation, multi-pair events as well as many other nonlinear effects are often also constrained to negligible levels.
Microcombs - optical frequency combs generated in microresonators - have advanced tremendously in the last decade, and are advantageous for applications in frequency metrology, navigation, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and microwave photonics. Crucially, microcombs offer the prospect of fully integrated miniaturized optical systems with unprecedented reductions in cost, size, weight, and power. However, this goal has been consistently hindered by the use of bulk free-space and fiber-optic components to process microcombs, limiting form factors to the table-top. Here, we address this challenge by introducing an integrated photonics interposer architecture to process microcombs and replace discrete components. Taking microcomb-based optical frequency synthesis in the telecom C-band around 1550 nm as our target application, we develop an interposer architecture that collects, routes, and interfaces octave-wide optical signals between photonic chiplets and heterogeneously integrated devices that constitute the synthesizer. We have implemented the octave spanning spectral filtering of a microcomb, central to the interposer, in the popular silicon nitride photonic platform, and have confirmed the requisite performance of the individual elements of the interposer. Moreover, we show that the thick silicon nitride needed for bright dissipative Kerr soliton generation can be integrated with the comparatively thin silicon nitride interposer layer through octave-bandwidth adiabatic evanescent coupling, indicating a path towards future system-level consolidation. Our interposer architecture addresses the immediate need for on-chip microcomb processing to successfully miniaturize microcomb systems. As microcombs and integrated devices evolve, our approach can be readily adapted to other metrology-grade applications based on optical atomic clocks and high-precision navigation and spectroscopy.
Quantum frequency combs from chip-scale integrated sources are promising candidates for scalable and robust quantum information processing (QIP). However, to use these quantum combs for frequency domain QIP, demonstration of entanglement in the frequency basis, showing that the entangled photons are in a coherent superposition of multiple frequency bins, is required. We present a verification of qubit and qutrit frequency-bin entanglement using an on-chip quantum frequency comb with 40 mode pairs, through a two-photon interference measurement that is based on electro-optic phase modulation. Our demonstrations provide an important contribution in establishing integrated optical microresonators as a source for high-dimensional frequency-bin encoded quantum computing, as well as dense quantum key distribution.