Micropillar single-photon source design for simultaneous near-unity efficiency and indistinguishability

Abstract

We present a numerical investigation of the performance of the micropillar cavity single-photon source in terms of collection efficiency and indistinguishability of the emitted photons in the presence of non-Markovian phonon-induced decoherence. We analyze the physics governing the efficiency using a single-mode model, and we optimize efficiency $\ensuremath{\varepsilon}$ and the indistinguishability $\ensuremath{\eta}$ on an equal footing by computing $\ensuremath{\varepsilon}\ensuremath{\eta}$ as function of the micropillar design parameters. We show that $\ensuremath{\varepsilon}\ensuremath{\eta}$ is limited to $\ensuremath{\sim}0.96$ for the ideal geometry due to an inherent tradeoff between efficiency and indistinguishability. Finally, we subsequently consider the influence of realistic fabrication imperfections and Markovian pure dephasing noise on the performance.