RESUMEN
Optomechanical crystals provide coupling between phonons and photons by confining them to commensurate wavelength-scale dimensions. We present a new concept for designing optomechanical crystals capable of achieving unprecedented coupling rates by confining optical and mechanical waves to deep sub-wavelength dimensions. Our design is based on a dielectric bowtie unit cell with an effective optical/mechanical mode volume of 7.6 × 10-3(λ/nSi)3/1.2×10-3 λ mech 3. We present results from numerical modeling, indicating a single-photon optomechanical coupling of 2.2 MHz with experimentally viable parameters. Monte Carlo simulations are used to demonstrate the design's robustness against fabrication disorder.
RESUMEN
Frequency encoding of quantum information together with fiber and integrated photonic technologies can significantly reduce the complexity and resource requirements for realizing all-photonic quantum networks. The key challenge for such frequency domain processing of single photons is to realize coherent and selective interactions between quantum optical fields of different frequencies over a range of bandwidths. Here, we report frequency-domain Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with spectrally distinct photons generated from a chip-based microresonator. We use four-wave mixing to implement an active "frequency beam splitter" and achieve interference visibilities of 0.95±0.02. Our work establishes four-wave mixing as a tool for selective high-fidelity two-photon operations in the frequency domain which, combined with integrated single-photon sources, provides a building block for frequency-multiplexed photonic quantum networks.
RESUMEN
Parametric single-photon sources are well suited for large-scale quantum networks due to their potential for photonic integration. Active multiplexing of photons can overcome the intrinsically probabilistic nature of these sources, resulting in near-deterministic operation. However, previous implementations using spatial and temporal multiplexing scale unfavorably due to rapidly increasing switching losses. Here, we break this limitation via frequency multiplexing in which switching losses remain fixed irrespective of the number of multiplexed modes. We use low-noise optical frequency conversion for efficient frequency switching and demonstrate multiplexing of three modes. We achieve a generation rate of 4.6 × 104 photons per second with an ultra-low g(2)(0) = 0.07 indicating high single-photon purity. Our scalable, all-fiber multiplexing system has a total loss of just 1.3 dB, such that the 4.8 dB multiplexing enhancement markedly overcomes switching loss. Our approach offers a promising path to creating a deterministic photon source on an integrated chip-based platform.