Heralded single-photon source from spontaneous four-wave mixing process in lossy waveguides

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the spontaneous four-wave mixing (FWM) process that occurs in optical waveguides, as a source of quantum correlated photon-pairs. We consider that the waveguide used to implement the spontaneous FWM process presents a high value of nonlinear parameter, γ = 93.4 W-1m-1, and a non-negligible value of loss coefficient, α = 133.3 dB/m. Moreover, the theoretical model also consider the Raman scattering that inevitably accompanies the FWM process, and generates time-uncorrelated (noise) photon pairs. We use the coincident-to-accidental ratio (CAR) as a figure of merit of the photon pair source, and we were able to observe a CAR of the order of 65 in a high loss regime. After, we use the time-correlated photon pairs generated by the spontaneous FWM process to implement a heralded single photon source at waveguide output. In this scenario, the detection of one photon of the pair heralds the presence of the other photon. The quality of the source was studied by the evaluation of the second order coherence function for one photon of the pair conditioned by the detection of its twin photon. We observe that the presence of a high loss coefficient tends to improve the quality of the photon source, when compared with the lossless regime, even considering the Raman noise photons. We obtain a value for the conditional second order coherence function of the order of 0.11 in absence of loss, and a value of 0.03 for a loss coefficient of 133.3 dB/m.