Spontaneous photon-pair generation at the nanoscale
Abstract
Optical nanoantennas have shown a great capacity for efficient extraction of photons from the near to the far-field, enabling directional emission from nanoscale single-photon sources. However, their potential for the generation and extraction of multi-photon quantum states remains unexplored. Here we demonstrate experimentally the nanoscale generation of two-photon quantum states at telecommunication wavelengths based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion in an optical nanoantenna. The antenna is a crystalline AlGaAs nanocylinder, possessing Mie-type resonances at both the pump and the bi-photon wavelengths and when excited by a pump beam generates photonpairs with a rate of 35 Hz. Normalized to the pump energy stored by the nanoantenna, this rate corresponds to 1.4 GHz/Wm, being one order of magnitude higher than conventional on-chip or bulk photon-pair sources. Our experiments open the way for multiplexing several antennas for coherent generation of multi-photon quantum states with complex spatial-mode entanglement and applications in free-space quantum communications and sensing.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.06956,
title = {Spontaneous photon-pair generation at the nanoscale},
author = {Giuseppe Marino and Alexander S. Solntsev and Lei Xu and Valerio F. Gili and Luca Carletti and Alexander N. Poddubny and Mohsen Rahmani and Daria A. Smirnova and Haitao Chen and Aristide Lemaître and Guoquan Zhang and Anatoly V. Zayats and Costantino De Angelis and Giuseppe Leo and Andrey A. Sukhorukov and Dragomir N. Neshev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.06956},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
A new author, Aristide Lema\^itre, has been added to the author list. No change has been made to the main text