On-Demand Single Photons with High Extraction Efficiency and Near-Unity Indistinguishability from a Resonantly Driven Quantum Dot in a Micropillar

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On-Demand Single Photons with High Extraction Efficiency and Near-Unity Indistinguishability from a Resonantly Driven Quantum Dot in a Micropillar

Xing Ding, Yu He, Z.-C. Duan, Niels Gregersen, M.-C. Chen, S. Unsleber, S. Maier, Christian Schneider, Martin Kamp, Sven Höfling, Chao-Yang Lu, and Jian-Wei Pan

Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 020401 – Published 14 January 2016

See Synopsis: All-Around Single-Photon Source

Abstract

Scalable photonic quantum technologies require on-demand single-photon sources with simultaneously high levels of purity, indistinguishability, and efficiency. These key features, however, have only been demonstrated separately in previous experiments. Here, by $s$ -shell pulsed resonant excitation of a Purcell-enhanced quantum dot-micropillar system, we deterministically generate resonance fluorescence single photons which, at $π$ pulse excitation, have an extraction efficiency of 66%, single-photon purity of 99.1%, and photon indistinguishability of 98.5%. Such a single-photon source for the first time combines the features of high efficiency and near-perfect levels of purity and indistinguishabilty, and thus opens the way to multiphoton experiments with semiconductor quantum dots.

Received 29 September 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.020401

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Semiconductor quantum optics

Quantum dots

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Synopsis

All-Around Single-Photon Source

Published 14 January 2016

A quantum dot embedded in a micropillar is an efficient source of pure and indistinguishable single photons.

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Authors & Affiliations

Xing Ding^1,2,3, Yu He^1,2,3, Z.-C. Duan^1,2,3, Niels Gregersen⁴, M.-C. Chen^1,2,3, S. Unsleber⁵, S. Maier⁵, Christian Schneider⁵, Martin Kamp⁵, Sven Höfling^1,5,6, Chao-Yang Lu^1,2,3,*, and Jian-Wei Pan^1,2,3,†

¹Shanghai Branch, National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai, 201315, China
²CAS Center for Excellence and Synergetic Innovation Center in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
³CAS-Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory, Shanghai 201315, China
⁴DTU Fotonik, Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Building 343, DK-2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
⁵Technische Physik, Physikalisches Instität and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen-Center for Complex Material Systems, Universitat Würzburg, Am Hubland, D-97074 Wüzburg, Germany
⁶SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews KY16 9SS, United Kingdom

^*cylu@ustc.edu.cn
^†pan@ustc.edu.cn

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Vol. 116, Iss. 2 — 15 January 2016

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Images

Figure 1
Purcell-enhanced QD-micropillar system. (a) An illustration of a single QD embedded in a micropillar. The QD is grown via molecular beam epitaxy, embedded in a $λ$ -thick GaAs cavity and sandwiched between 25.5 lower and 15 upper DBR stacks. Micropillars with $2.5 μ m$ diameter were defined via electron beam lithography [18]. (b) 2D intensity (in log scale) plot of temperature-dependent microphotoluminescence spectra. The excitation cw laser is at 780 nm wavelength and the power is $\sim 3 nW$ . (c) Pulsed RF lifetime as a function of QD-cavity detuning by varying the temperature. The time-resolved data are measured using a superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors with a fast time resolution of $\sim 63 ps$ . The orange curve is a fit using the standard theoretical formula from Ref. [19]. The inset shows two examples of time-resolved RF counts at QD-cavity resonance and at far detuning.
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Figure 2
Characterization of the pulsed RF single-photon source. (a) A high-resolution RF spectrum when excited by a $π$ pulse, obtained using a home-built Fabry-Perot scanning cavity with a finesse of 170, a linewidth of 220 MHz (full width at half maximum), a free spectral range of 37.4 GHz, and a total transmission rate of 61%. The orange line was fitted using a Voigt profile. (b) Detected pulsed RF counts on a silicon single-photon detector as a function of the square root of excitation laser power. The blue curve is a guide to the eyes. (c) Intensity-correlation histogram of the pulsed RF photons under $π$ pulse excitation obtained using a Hanbury Brown and Twiss-type setup [22]. The second-order correlation $g^{2} (0) = 0.009 (1)$ is calculated from the integrated photon counts in the zero delay peak divided by its adjacent peak. (d) The photons collected into the first lens per pulse (generation $+$ extraction efficiency) vs single-photon purity vs pump power.
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Figure 3
Quantum interference between two pulsed RF single photons from a Purcell-enhanced QD-micropillar system. The time separation between the two single photons emitted from the single QD are set at 2.1 ns in (a)–(b) and 12.4 ns in (c)–(d), respectively. The input two photons are $π$ -pulse excited and prepared in cross (a), (c) and parallel (b), (d) polarizations, respectively. The fitting function is the convolution of exponential decay (emitter decay response) with Gaussian (photon detection time response). The area of the fitted central peaks are extracted and used to calculate the raw visibility, which is 0.964(3) and 0.959(3) for the time delay of 2.1 and 12.4 ns, respectively. All the data points presented are raw data without background subtraction.
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