Towards optimal single-photon sources from polarized microcavities
Abstract
An optimal single-photon source should deterministically deliver one and only one photon at a time, with no trade-off between the source's efficiency and the photon indistinguishability. However, all reported solid-state sources of indistinguishable single photons had to rely on polarization filtering which reduced the efficiency by 50%, which fundamentally limited the scaling of photonic quantum technologies. Here, we overcome this final long-standing challenge by coherently driving quantum dots deterministically coupled to polarization-selective Purcell microcavities--two examples are narrowband, elliptical micropillars and broadband, elliptical Bragg gratings. A polarization-orthogonal excitation-collection scheme is designed to minimize the polarization-filtering loss under resonant excitation. We demonstrate a polarized single-photon efficiency of 0.60+/-0.02 (0.56+/-0.02), a single-photon purity of 0.975+/-0.005 (0.991+/-0.003), and an indistinguishability of 0.975+/-0.006 (0.951+/-0.005) for the micropillar (Bragg grating) device. Our work provides promising solutions for truly optimal single-photon sources combining near-unity indistinguishability and near-unity system efficiency simultaneously.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.06818,
title = {Towards optimal single-photon sources from polarized microcavities},
author = {Hui Wang and Yu-Ming He and Tung Hsun Chung and Hai Hu and Ying Yu and Si Chen and Xing Ding and Ming-Cheng Chen and Jian Qin and Xiaoxia Yang and Run-Ze Liu and Zhao-Chen Duan and Jin-Peng Li and Stefan Gerhardt and Karol Winkler and Jonathan Jurkat and Lin-Jun Wang and Niels Gregersen and Yong-Heng Huo and Qing Dai and Siyuan Yu and Sven Hoefling and Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.06818},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
28 pages, 16 figures. partial overlap with arXiv:1809.10992 which was unpublished