Integrated photonics offers great potential for quantum communication devices in terms of complexity, robustness and scalability. Silicon photonics in particular is a leading platform for quantum photonic technologies, with further benefits of miniaturisation, cost-effective device manufacture and compatibility with CMOS microelectronics. However, effective techniques for high-speed modulation of quantum states in standard silicon photonic platforms have been limited. Here we overcome this limitation and demonstrate high-speed low-error quantum key distribution modulation with silicon photonic devices combining slow thermo-optic DC biases and fast (10~GHz bandwidth) carrier-depletion modulation. The ability to scale up these integrated circuits and incorporate microelectronics opens the way to new and advanced integrated quantum communication technologies and larger adoption of quantum-secured communications.
@article{arxiv.1612.07236,
title = {Integrated Silicon Photonics for High-Speed Quantum Key Distribution},
author = {Philip Sibson and Jake E. Kennard and Stasja Stanisic and Chris Erven and Jeremy L. O'Brien and Mark G Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.07236},
year = {2016}
}