Heralded Multiplexed High-Efficiency Cascaded Source of Dual-Rail Entangled Photon Pairs Using Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion

Abstract

Deterministic sources of high-fidelity entangled qubit pairs encoded in the dual-rail photonic basis, i.e., presence of a single photon in one of two orthogonal modes, are a key enabling technology of many applications of quantum information processing, including high-rate high-fidelity quantum communications over long distances. The most popular and mature sources of such photonic entanglement, e.g., those that leverage spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) or spontaneous four-wave mixing (sFWM), generate an entangled (so-called, continuous-variable) quantum state that contains contributions from high-order photon terms that lie outside the span of the dual-rail basis, which is detrimental to most applications. One often uses low pump power to mitigate the effects of those high-order terms. However that reduces the pair generation rate, and the source becomes inherently probabilistic. We investigate a cascaded source that performs a linear-optical entanglement swap between two SPDC sources, to generate a heralded photonic entangled state that has a higher fidelity (to the ideal Bell state) compared to a free-running SPDC source. Further, with the Bell swap providing a heralding trigger, we show how to build a multiplexed source, which despite reasonable switching losses and detector loss and noise, yields a Fidelity versus Success Probability trade-off of a high-efficiency source of high-fidelity dual-rail photonic entanglement. We find however that there is a threshold of $1.5$ dB of loss per switch, beyond which multiplexing hurts the Fidelity versus Success Probability trade-off.