Efficient sources of individual pairs of entangled photons are required for quantum networks to operate using fibre optic infrastructure. Entangled light can be generated by quantum dots (QDs) with naturally small fine-structure-splitting (FSS) between exciton eigenstates. Moreover, QDs can be engineered to emit at standard telecom wavelengths. To achieve sufficient signal intensity for applications, QDs have been incorporated into 1D optical microcavities. However, combining these properties in a single device has so far proved elusive. Here, we introduce a growth strategy to realise QDs with small FSS in the conventional telecom band, and within an optical cavity. Our approach employs droplet-epitaxy of InAs quantum dots on (001) substrates. We show the scheme improves the symmetry of the dots by 72%. Furthermore, our technique is universal, and produces low FSS QDs by molecular beam epitaxy on GaAs emitting at ~900nm, and metal-organic vapour phase epitaxy on InP emitting at 1550 nm, with mean FSS 4x smaller than for Stranski-Krastanow QDs.
@article{arxiv.1609.08457,
title = {Universal growth scheme for entanglement-ready quantum dots},
author = {Joanna Skiba-Szymanska and R. Mark Stevenson and Christiana Varnava and Martin Felle and Jan Huwer and Tina Müller and Anthony J. Bennett and James P. Lee and Ian Farrer and Andrey Krysa and Peter Spencer and Lucy E. Goff and David A. Ritchie and Jon Heffernan and Andrew J. Shields},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08457},
year = {2017}
}