Nonlinear Photon Pair Generation in a Highly Dispersive Medium

Abstract

Photon pair generation in silicon photonic integrated circuits relies on four wave mixing via the third order nonlinearity. Due to phase matching requirements and group velocity dispersion, this method has typically required TE polarized light. Here, we demonstrate TM polarized photon pair production in linearly uncoupled silicon resonators with more than an order of magnitude more dispersion than previous work. We achieve measured rates above 2.8 kHz and a heralded second order correlation of $g^{(2)}(0) = 0.0442 \pm 0.0042$. This method enables phase matching in dispersive media and paves the way for novel entanglement generation in silicon photonic devices.