Using tapered fibers of As2Se3 chalcogenide glass, we produce photon pairs at telecommunication wavelengths with low pump powers. We found maximum coincidences-to-accidentals ratios of 2.13±0.07 for degenerate pumping with 3.2 {\mu}W average power, and 1.33±0.03 for non-degenerate pumping with 1.0 {\mu}W and 1.5 {\mu}W average power of the two pumps. Our results show that the ultrahigh nonlinearity in these microwires could allow single-photon pumping to produce photon pairs, enabling the production of large entangled states, heralding of single photons after lossy transmission, and photonic quantum information processing with nonlinear optics.
@article{arxiv.1501.03532,
title = {Power-efficient production of photon pairs in a tapered chalcogenide microwire},
author = {Evan Meyer-Scott and Audrey Dot and Raja Ahmad and Lizhu Li and Martin Rochette and Thomas Jennewein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.03532},
year = {2015}
}