Abstract
Lithium-Niobate-On-Insulator (LNOI) is emerging as a promising platform for integrated quantum photonic technologies because of its high second-order nonlinearity and compact waveguide footprint. Importantly, LNOI allows for creating electro-optically reconfigurable circuits, which can be efficiently operated at cryogenic temperature. Their integration with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) paves the way for realizing scalable photonic devices for active manipulation and detection of quantum states of light. Here we demonstrate integration of these two key components in a low loss (0.2 dB/cm) LNOI waveguide network. As an experimental showcase of our technology, we demonstrate the combined operation of an electrically tunable Mach-Zehnder interferometer and two waveguide-integrated SNSPDs at its outputs. We show static reconfigurability of our system with a bias-drift-free operation over a time of 12 hours, as well as high-speed modulation at a frequency up to 1 GHz. Our results provide blueprints for implementing complex quantum photonic devices on the LNOI platform.
Highlights
Lithium-Niobate-On-Insulator (LNOI) is emerging as a promising platform for integrated quantum photonic technologies because of its high second-order nonlinearity and compact waveguide footprint
A fiber v-groove array with a pitch of 127 μm and an RF contact probe with a pitch of 125 μm is used to couple light into and out of the optical circuit, and to drive the electronic circuits of the Electro-optic modulators (EOMs) and the two superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), respectively
For applications requiring only static tunability—e.g., a reconfigurable Boson sampler49,50—this voltage value can be readily achieved by the use of commercially available multichannel digital-to-analog converters, while for fast switching operations at frequencies of hundreds of MHz up to the ~GHz regime, which is typically required for quantum photonic applications, a viable solution is the use of pulse generators combined with mid-power RF amplifiers[52]
Summary
Lithium-Niobate-On-Insulator (LNOI) is emerging as a promising platform for integrated quantum photonic technologies because of its high second-order nonlinearity and compact waveguide footprint. LNOI allows for creating electro-optically reconfigurable circuits, which can be efficiently operated at cryogenic temperature Their integration with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) paves the way for realizing scalable photonic devices for active manipulation and detection of quantum states of light. Electro-optic modulators (EOMs) based on the Pockels effect can overcome all the aforementioned limitations, and provide a simple and cryogenic-compatible[30,31,32,33] platform for on-chip reconfigurable photonics In this context, thin Lithium Niobate films bonded onto a silica insulating substrate (LNOI: lithiumniobate-on-insulator) have recently emerged as a attractive technology for the realization of waveguides with submicron scale in χ(2)-nonlinear materials[34]. LNOI holds great promise for implementing all the required operations for quantum photonic technologies—single-photon detection, quantum state manipulation, and nonlinear state generation—on a single monolithic platform
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