Abstract
The merger between integrated photonics and quantum optics promises new opportunities within photonic quantum technology with the very significant progress on excellent photon-emitter interfaces and advanced optical circuits. A key missing functionality is rapid circuitry reconfigurability that ultimately does not introduce loss or emitter decoherence, and operating at a speed matching the photon generation and quantum memory storage time of the on-chip quantum emitter. This ambitious goal requires entirely new active quantum-photonic devices by extending the traditional approaches to reconfigurability. Here, by merging nano-optomechanics and deterministic photon-emitter interfaces we demonstrate on-chip single-photon routing with low loss, small device footprint, and an intrinsic time response approaching the spin coherence time of solid-state quantum emitters. The device is an essential building block for constructing advanced quantum photonic architectures on-chip, towards, e.g., coherent multi-photon sources, deterministic photon-photon quantum gates, quantum repeater nodes, or scalable quantum networks.
Highlights
Photonic quantum technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to implement quantum optics experiments directly on a chip, thereby replacing large-scale optical setups with integrated devices interfacing high-efficiency single-photon emitters, waveguide circuitry, and detectors [1]
While significant progress has been made in the fabrication of advanced quantum optical circuits for processing single photons [2,3,4] towards, e.g., quantum computing [5], it appears very demanding to scale up quantum processors based on linear optics alone [6]
We have demonstrated an on-chip reconfigurable circuit, which was used for routing single photons emitted from quantum dots (QDs)
Summary
Photonic quantum technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to implement quantum optics experiments directly on a chip, thereby replacing large-scale optical setups with integrated devices interfacing high-efficiency single-photon emitters, waveguide circuitry, and detectors [1]. The development of a deterministic and coherent interface between a single photon and a single emitter, as recently demonstrated with atoms [7,8], defect centers [9], and quantum dots [10], leads to novel opportunities for quantum photonics. As a quantitative prospect of the technology, we estimate that a single-qubit unitary gate composed of a controllable beam splitter and a phase shifter could be built with a footprint smaller than 30 μm and with a response time of 100–200 ns. With such an approach, fully integrated photonic quantum processing may be within reach
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