Semiconductor nanowires offer a powerful platform for engineering light at the nanoscale by controlling their size and shape in order to guide light efficiently and minimize undesired reflections. In this work we have shaped the nanowires with a unique tapering to realize bright quantum dot based entangled photon sources and high efficiency single photon detectors with high speed and timing resolution over an unprecedented bandwidth.

Quantum photonic integrated circuits require a scalable approach to integrate bright on-demand sources of entangled photon-pairs in complex on-chip quantum photonic circuits. Currently, the most promising sources are based on III/V semiconductor quantum dots. However, complex photonic circuitry is mainly achieved in silicon photonics due to the tremendous technological challenges in circuit fabrication. We take the best of both worlds by developing a new hybrid on-chip nanofabrication approach, allowing to integrate III/V semiconductor nanowire quantum emitters into silicon-based photonics.

True on-demand high-repetition-rate single-photon sources are highly sought after for quantum information processing applications. However, any coherently driven two-level quantum system suffers from a finite re-excitation probability under pulsed excitation, causing undesirable multi-photon emission. Here, we present a solid-state source of on-demand single photons yielding a raw second-order coherence of g(2)(0)=(7.5±1.6)×10-5 without any background subtraction or data processing. To this date, this is the lowest value of g(2)(0) reported for any single-photon source even compared to the previously reported best background subtracted values. We achieve this result on GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots embedded in a low-Q planar cavity by employing (i) a two-photon excitation process and (ii) a filtering and detection setup featuring two superconducting single-photon detectors with ultralow dark-count rates of (0.0056±0.0007) s^-1 and (0.017±0.001) s^-1, respectively. Re-excitation processes are dramatically suppressed by (i), while (ii) removes false coincidences resulting in a negligibly low noise floor.

Quantum dots tuned to atomic resonances represent an emerging field of hybrid quantum systems where the advantages of quantum dots and natural atoms can be combined. Embedding quantum dots in nanowires boosts these systems with a set of powerful possibilities, such as precise positioning of the emitters, excellent photon extraction efficiency and direct electrical contacting of quantum dots. Notably, nanowire structures can be grown on silicon substrates, allowing for a straightforward integration with silicon-based photonic devices. In this work we show controlled growth of nanowire-quantum-dot structures on silicon, frequency tuned to atomic transitions. We grow GaAs quantum dots in AlGaAs nanowires with a nearly pure crystal structure and excellent optical properties. We precisely control the dimensions of quantum dots and their position inside nanowires and demonstrate that the emission wavelength can be engineered over the range of at least 30 nm around 765 nm. By applying an external magnetic field, we are able to fine-tune the emission frequency of our nanowire quantum dots to the D₂ transition of ⁸⁷Rb. We use the Rb transitions to precisely measure the actual spectral line width of the photons emitted from a nanowire quantum dot to be 9.4 ± 0.7 μeV, under nonresonant excitation. Our work brings highly desirable functionalities to quantum technologies, enabling, for instance, a realization of a quantum network, based on an arbitrary number of nanowire single-photon sources, all operating at the same frequency of an atomic transition.

Global, secure quantum channels will require efficient distribution of entangled photons. Long distance, low-loss interconnects can only be realized using photons as quantum information carriers. However, a quantum light source combining both high qubit fidelity and on-demand bright emission has proven elusive. Here, we show a bright photonic nanostructure generating polarization-entangled photon pairs that strongly violates Bell's inequality. A highly symmetric InAsP quantum dot generating entangled photons is encapsulated in a tapered nanowire waveguide to ensure directional emission and efficient light extraction. We collect ∼200 kHz entangled photon pairs at the first lens under 80 MHz pulsed excitation, which is a 20 times enhancement as compared to a bare quantum dot without a photonic nanostructure. The performed Bell test using the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality reveals a clear violation (S _CHSH > 2) by up to 9.3 standard deviations. By using a novel quasi-resonant excitation scheme at the wurtzite InP nanowire resonance to reduce multi-photon emission, the entanglement fidelity (F = 0.817 ± 0.002) is further enhanced without temporal post-selection, allowing for the violation of Bell's inequality in the rectilinear-circular basis by 25 standard deviations. Our results on nanowire-based quantum light sources highlight their potential application in secure data communication utilizing measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution and quantum repeater protocols.

One of the major challenges in the growth of quantum well and quantum dot heterostructures is the realization of atomically sharp interfaces. Nanowires provide a new opportunity to engineer the band structure as they facilitate the controlled switching of the crystal structure between the zinc-blende (ZB) and wurtzite (WZ) phases. Such a crystal phase switching results in the formation of crystal phase quantum wells (CPQWs) and quantum dots (CPQDs). For GaP CPQWs, the inherent electric fields due to the discontinuity of the spontaneous polarization at the WZ/ZB junctions lead to the confinement of both types of charge carriers at the opposite interfaces of the WZ/ZB/WZ structure. This confinement leads to a novel type of transition across a ZB flat plate barrier. Here, we show digital tuning of the visible emission of WZ/ZB/WZ CPQWs in a GaP nanowire by changing the thickness of the ZB barrier. The energy spacing between the sharp emission lines is uniform and is defined by the addition of single ZB monolayers. The controlled growth of identical quantum wells with atomically flat interfaces at predefined positions featuring digitally tunable discrete emission energies may provide a new route to further advance entangled photons in solid state quantum systems.

In this paper, we characterize the Thermo-optic properties of silicon nitride ring resonators between 18 and 300 K. The Thermo-optic coefficients of the silicon nitride core and the oxide cladding are measured by studying the temperature dependence of the resonance wavelengths. The resonant modes show low temperature dependence at cryogenic temperatures and higher dependence as the temperature increases. We find the Thermo-optic coefficients of PECVD silicon nitride and silicon oxide to be 2.51 ± 0.08 E- 5 K^-1 and 0.96 ± 0.09 E-5 K^-1 at room temperature while decreasing by an order of magnitude when cooling to 18 K. To show the effect of variations in the thermo-optic coefficients on device performance, we study the tuning of a fully integrated electrically tunable filter as a function of voltage for different temperatures. The presented results provide new practical guidelines in designing photonic circuits for studying low-temperature optical phenomena.

We present an experimental route to engineer the exciton energies of single quantum dots in nanowires. By integrating the nanowires onto a piezoelectric crystal, we controllably apply strain fields to the nanowire quantum dots. Consequently, the exciton energy of a single quantum dot in the nanowire is shifted by several meVs without degrading its optical intensity and single-photon purity. Second-order autocorrelation measurements are performed at different strain fields on the same nanowire quantum dot. The suppressed multi-photon events at zero time delay clearly verify that the quantum nature of single-photon emission is well preserved under external strain fields. The work presented here could facilitate on-chip optical quantum information processing with the nanowire based single photon emitters.

A major step toward fully integrated quantum optics is the deterministic incorporation of high quality single photon sources in on-chip optical circuits. We show a novel hybrid approach in which preselected III-V single quantum dots in nanowires are transferred and integrated in silicon based photonic circuits. The quantum emitters maintain their high optical quality after integration as verified by measuring a low multiphoton probability of 0.07 ± 0.07 and emission line width as narrow as 3.45 ± 0.48 GHz. Our approach allows for optimum alignment of the quantum dot light emission to the fundamental waveguide mode resulting in very high coupling efficiencies. We estimate a coupling efficiency of 24.3 ± 1.7% from the studied single-photon source to the photonic channel and further show by finite-difference time-domain simulations that for an optimized choice of material and design the efficiency can exceed 90%.