We demonstrate heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The strong modal confinement and slow group velocity provided by a coupled resonator optical waveguide (CROW) produced a large four-wave-mixing nonlinearity coefficient gamma_eff ~4100 W^-1 m^-1 at telecommunications wavelengths. Spontaneous four-wave-mixing using a degenerate pump beam at 1549.6 nm created photon pairs at 1529.5 nm and 1570.5 nm with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding 20. A photon correlation measurement of the signal (1529.5 nm) photons heralded by the detection of the idler (1570.5 nm) photons showed antibunching with g^(2)(0) = 0.19 \pm 0.03. The demonstration of a single photon source within a silicon platform holds promise for future integrated quantum photonic circuits.
@article{arxiv.1201.2659,
title = {Telecommunications-band heralded single photons from a silicon nanophotonic chip},
author = {Marcelo Davanco and Jun Rong Ong and Andrea Bahgat Shehata and Alberto Tosi and Imad Agha and Solomon Assefa and Fengnian Xia and William M. J. Green and Shayan Mookherjea and Kartik Srinivasan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.2659},
year = {2015}
}