Chip-scale Sources Research Articles

Quantum Entanglement between Optical and Microwave Photonic Qubits

Entanglement is an extraordinary feature of quantum mechanics. Sources of entangled optical photons were essential to test the foundations of quantum physics through violations of Bell’s inequalities. More recently, entangled many-body states have been realized via strong nonlinear interactions in microwave circuits with superconducting qubits. Here, we demonstrate a chip-scale source of entangled optical and microwave photonic qubits. Our device platform integrates a piezo-optomechanical transducer with a superconducting resonator which is robust under optical illumination. We drive a photon-pair generation process and employ a dual-rail encoding intrinsic to our system to prepare entangled states of microwave and optical photons. We place a lower bound on the fidelity of the entangled state by measuring microwave and optical photons in two orthogonal bases. This entanglement source can directly interface telecom wavelength time-bin qubits and gigahertz frequency superconducting qubits, two well-established platforms for quantum communication and computation, respectively. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Voltage-tunable optical parametric oscillator with an alternating dispersion dimer integrated on a chip

Optical parametric oscillators enable the conversion of pump light to new frequency bands using nonlinear optical processes. Recent advances in integrated nonlinear photonics have led to the creation of compact, chip-scale sources via Kerr-nonlinearity-induced parametric oscillations. While these sources have provided broadband wavelength tuning, the ability to tune the emission wavelength via dynamically altering the dispersion has not been attained so far. Here we present a voltage-tunable, on-chip integrated optical parametric oscillator based on an alternating-dispersion dimer, allowing us to tune the emission over nearly 20 THz near 1550 nm. Unlike previous approaches, our device eliminates the need for a widely tunable pump laser source and provides efficient pump filtering at the drop port of the auxiliary ring. Integration of this scheme on a chip opens up the possibility of compact and low-cost voltage-tunable parametric oscillators with diverse application possibilities.

Unifying Frequency Combs in Active and Passive Cavities: Temporal Solitons in Externally Driven Ring Lasers.

Frequency combs have become a prominent research area in optics. Of particular interest as integrated comb technology are chip-scale sources, such as semiconductor lasers and microresonators, which consist of resonators embedding a nonlinear medium either with or without population inversion. Such active and passive cavities were so far treated distinctly. Here we propose a formal unification by introducing a general equation that describes both types of cavities. The equation also captures the physics of a hybrid device-a semiconductor ring laser with an external optical drive-in which we show the existence of temporal solitons, previously identified only in microresonators, thanks to symmetry breaking and self-localization phenomena typical of spatially extended dissipative systems.

Ultrabright Entangled-Photon-Pair Generation from anAlGaAs-On-Insulator Microring Resonator

Entangled-photon pairs are an essential resource for quantum information technologies. Chip-scale sources of entangled pairs have been integrated with various photonic platforms, including silicon, nitrides, indium phosphide, and lithium niobate, but each has fundamental limitations that restrict the photon-pair brightness and quality, including weak optical nonlinearity or high waveguide loss. Here, we demonstrate a novel, ultra-low-loss AlGaAs-on-insulator platform capable of generating time-energy entangled photons in a $Q$ $>1$ million microring resonator with nearly 1,000-fold improvement in brightness compared to existing sources. The waveguide-integrated source exhibits an internal generation rate greater than $20\times 10^9$ pairs sec$^{-1}$ mW$^{-2}$, emits near 1550 nm, produces heralded single photons with $>99\%$ purity, and violates Bell's inequality by more than 40 standard deviations with visibility $>97\%$. Combined with the high optical nonlinearity and optical gain of AlGaAs for active component integration, these are all essential features for a scalable quantum photonic platform.

Toward new frontiers for terahertz quantum cascade laser frequency combs

AbstractBroadband, quantum-engineered, quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are the most powerful chip-scale sources of optical frequency combs (FCs) across the mid-infrared and the terahertz (THz) frequency range. The inherently short intersubband upper state lifetime spontaneously allows mode proliferation, with large quantum efficiencies, as a result of the intracavity four-wave mixing. QCLs can be easily integrated with external elements or engineered for intracavity embedding of nonlinear optical components and can inherently operate as quantum detectors, providing an intriguing technological platform for on-chip quantum investigations at the nanoscale. The research field of THz FCs is extremely vibrant and promises major impacts in several application domains crossing dual-comb spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging, time-domain nanoimaging, quantum science and technology, metrology and nonlinear optics in a miniaturized and compact architecture. Here, we discuss the fundamental physical properties and the technological performances of THz QCL FCs, highlighting the future perspectives of this frontier research field.

Temporally Asymmetric Biphoton States in Cavity-Enhanced Optical Parametric Processes

Generation and control of quantum states of light on an integrated platform has become an essential tool for scalable quantum technologies. Chip scale sources such as nonlinear optical microcavities have been demonstrated to efficiently generate entangled bi-photon states. However these systems have little control over the continuous variable time-energy entanglement of the photons. We demonstrate such control by preparing bi-photon states with asymmetric temporal wavefunctions by selectively modifying the density of states of the cavity modes taking part in the interaction using Rayleigh scattering-induced strong coupling of optical modes of a resonator. These states reveal exotic coherence properties and show a path forward for continuous variable quantum state engineering on a chip.

Microresonator-based comb generation without an external laser source

We demonstrate a fiber-microresonator dual-cavity architecture with which we generate 880 nm of comb bandwidth without the need for a continuous-wave pump laser. Comb generation with this pumping scheme is greatly simplified as compared to pumping with a single frequency laser, and the generated combs are inherently robust due to the intrinsic feedback mechanism. Temporal and radio frequency (RF) characterization show a regime of steady comb formation that operates with reduced RF amplitude noise. The dual-cavity design is capable of being integrated on-chip and offers the potential of a turn-key broadband multiple wavelength source.

Silicon-based monolithic optical frequency comb source

We demonstrate the generation of broad-bandwidth optical frequency combs from a CMOS-compatible integrated microresonator. We characterize the comb quality using a novel self-referencing method and verify that the comb line frequencies are equidistant over a bandwidth of 115 nm (14.5 THz), which is nearly an order of magnitude larger than previous measurements.

RF linewidth of a monolithic quantum dot mode-locked laser under resonant feedback

The stability of a quantum dot (QD) mode-locked laser is experimentally shown to bifurcate under resonant optical feedback, which leads to either a reduction or an enhancement of the noise within the laser's cavity. These two behaviours, which are theoretically known as the nearly exact resonant and stably resonant feedback conditions, are characterised using the RF linewidth of the QD device. Under the stably resonant case with relatively low feedback strength and constant temperature control, the RF linewidth narrows to a value as low as 170 Hz. Noise enhancement, which is a precursor to coherence collapse, is observed in the device under the nearly exact resonant case. Under proper conditions, the results presented show that the combination of external optical feedback and the relatively low threshold of QD mode-locked lasers make them attractive chip-scale sources for ultra-low noise photonic applications.

Light Well: A Tunable Free-Electron Light Source on a Chip

The passage of a free-electron beam through a nanohole in a periodically layered metal-dielectric structure creates a new type of tunable, nanoscale radiation source--a "light well". In the reported demonstration, tunable light is generated at an intensity of approximately 200 W/cm(2) as electrons with energies in the 20-40 keV range are injected into gold-silica well structures with a lateral size of just a few hundred nanometers.