High spectral purity silicon ring resonator photon-pair source

Abstract

Here we present the experimental demonstration of a Silicon ring resonator photon-pair source. The crystalline Silicon ring resonator (radius of 18.5μm) was designed to realize low dispersion across multiple resonances, which allows for operation with a high quality factor of Q~50k. In turn, the source exhibits very high brightness of >3x10⁵ photons/s/mW²/GHz since the produced photon pairs have a very narrow bandwidth. Furthermore, the waveguidefiber coupling loss was minimized to <1.5dB using an inverse tapered waveguide (tip width of ~150nm over a 300μm length) that is butt-coupled to a high-NA fiber (Nufern UHNA-7). This ensured minimal loss of photon pairs to the detectors, which enabled very high purity photon pairs with minimal noise, as exhibited by a very high Coincidental-Accidental Ratio of >1900. The low coupling loss (3dB fiber-fiber) also allowed for operation with very low off-chip pump power of <200μW. In addition, the zero dispersion of the ring resonator resulted in the production of a photon-pair comb across multiple resonances symmetric about the pump resonance (every ~5nm spanning >20nm), which could be used in future wavelength division multiplexed quantum networks.