Solid-state emitters are excellent candidates for developing integrated sources of single photons. Yet, phonons degrade the photon indistinguishability both through pure dephasing of the zero-phonon line and through phonon-assisted emission. Here, we study theoretically and experimentally the indistinguishability of photons emitted by a semiconductor quantum dot in a microcavity as a function of temperature. We show that a large coupling to a high quality factor cavity can simultaneously reduce the effect of both phonon-induced sources of decoherence. It first limits the effect of pure dephasing on the zero phonon line with indistinguishabilities above 97% up to 18 K. Moreover, it efficiently redirects the phonon sidebands into the zero-phonon line and brings the indistinguishability of the full emission spectrum from 87% (resp. 24%) without cavity effect to more than 99% (resp. 76%) at 0 K (resp. 20 K). We provide guidelines for optimal cavity designs that further minimize the phonon-induced decoherence.
@article{arxiv.1612.03063,
title = {Reducing phonon-induced decoherence in solid-state single-photon sources with cavity quantum electrodynamics},
author = {Thomas Grange and Niccolo Somaschi and Carlos Antón and Lorenzo De Santis and Guillaume Coppola and Valérian Giesz and Aristide Lemaître and Isabelle Sagnes and Alexia Auffèves and Pascale Senellart},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.03063},
year = {2017}
}