High performance guided-wave asynchronous heralded single photon source

Olivier Alibart (1) , Daniel Barry Ostrowsky (1) , Pascal Baldi (1) , Sébastien Tanzilli (2)

1 LPMC - Laboratoire de physique de la matière condensée
2 GAP-O - Groupe de Physique Aplliquée - Optique

We report on a guided wave heralded photon source based on the creation of non-degenerate photon pairs by spontaneous parametric down conversion in a Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate waveguide. Using the signal photon at 1310 nm as a trigger, a gated detection process permits announcing the arrival of single photons at 1550 nm at the output of a single mode optical fiber with a high probability of 0.38. At the same time the multi-photon emission probability is reduced by a factor of 10 compared to poissonian light sources. Relying on guided wave technologies such as integrated optics and fiber optics components, our source offers stability, compactness and efficiency and can serve as a paradigm for guided wave devices applied to quantum communication and computation using existing telecom networks.

Mots clés: nonlinear optics; quantum optics; telecom; single photon source; SPS; guided wave technology

Domaines: Physique Quantique [quant-ph]; Optique [physics.optics]

Olivier Alibart, Daniel Barry Ostrowsky, Pascal Baldi, Sébastien Tanzilli. High performance guided-wave asynchronous heralded single photon source. Optics Letters, 2005, 30 (12), pp.1539. ⟨10.1364/OL.30.001539⟩. ⟨hal-00001560v4⟩