Building a quantum internet requires efficient and reliable quantum hardware, from photonic sources to quantum repeaters and detectors, ideally operating at telecommunication wavelengths. Thanks to their high brightness and single-photon purity, quantum dot (QD) sources hold the promise to achieve high communication rates for quantum-secured network applications. Furthermore, it was recently shown that excitation schemes, such as longitudinal acoustic phonon-assisted (LA) pumping, provide security benefits by scrambling the coherence between the emitted photon-number states. In this work, we investigate further advantages of LA-pumped quantum dots with emission in the telecom C-band as a core hardware component of the quantum internet. We experimentally demonstrate how varying the pump energy and spectral detuning with respect to the excitonic transition can improve quantum-secured communication rates and provide stable emission statistics regardless of network-environment fluctuations. These findings have significant implications for general implementations of QD single-photon sources in practical quantum communication networks.
@article{arxiv.2305.13273,
title = {Robust excitation of C-band quantum dots for quantum communication},
author = {Michal Vyvlecka and Lennart Jehle and Cornelius Nawrath and Francesco Giorgino and Mathieu Bozzio and Robert Sittig and Michael Jetter and Simone L. Portalupi and Peter Michler and Philip Walther},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13273},
year = {2023}
}