We develop a general Hamiltonian treatement of spontaneous four-wave mixing in a microring resonator side-coupled to a channel waveguide. The effect of scattering losses in the ring is included, as well as parasitic nonlinear effects including self- and cross-phase modulation. A procedure for computing the output of such a system for arbitrary parameters and pump states is presented. For the limit of weak pumping an expression for the joint spectral intensity of generated photon pairs, as well as the singles-to-coincidences ratio, is derived.
We report on four-wave mixing in a silicon microring resonator using a self-pumping scheme instead of an external laser. The ring resonator is inserted in an external-loop cavity with a fibered semiconductor amplifier as a source of gain. The silicon microring acts as a filter and we observe lasing in one of the microring's resonances. We study correlations between signal and idler generated beams using a Joint Spectral Density experiment.
We utilize cross-phase modulation to observe all-optical switching in microring resonators fabricated with hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). Using 2.7-ps pulses from a mode-locked fiber laser in the telecom C-band, we observe optical switching of a cw telecom-band probe with full-width at half-maximum switching times of 14.8 ps, using approximately 720 fJ of energy deposited in the microring. In comparison with telecom-band optical switching in undoped crystalline silicon microrings, a-Si:H exhibits substantially higher switching speeds due to reduced impact of free-carrier processes.
We describe a new approach for on-chip optical non-reciprocity which makes use of strong optomechanical interaction in microring resonators. By optically pumping the ring resonator in one direction, the optomechanical coupling is only enhanced in that direction, and consequently, the system exhibits a non-reciprocal response. For different configurations, this system can function either as an optical isolator or a coherent non-reciprocal phase shifter. We show that the operation of such a device on the level of single-photon could be achieved with existing technology.
We propose and analyze an on-chip all-optical dynamical tuning scheme for coupled nonlinear resonators employing a single control beam injected in parallel with a signal beam. We show that nonlinear Kerr response can be used to dynamically switch the spectral properties between "dark-state" and electromagnetically-induced transparency configurations. Such scheme can be realized in integrated optical applications for pulse trapping and delaying.
Microring resonators are critical photonic components used in filtering, sensing and nonlinear applications. To date, the development of high performance microring resonators in LNOI has been limited by the sidewall angle, roughness and etch depth of fabricated rib waveguides. We present large free spectral range microring resonators patterned via electron beam lithography in high-index contrast $Z$-cut LNOI. Our microring resonators achieve an FSR greater than 5 nm for ring radius of 30 $μ$m and a large 3 dB resonance bandwidth. We demonstrate 3 pm/V electro-optic tuning of a 70 $μ$m-radius r…
Systems of coupled cavity modes have the potential to provide bright quantum optical states of light in a highly versatile manner. Microring resonators for instance are highly scalable candidates for photon sources thanks to CMOS fabrication techniques, their small footprint and the relative ease of coupling many such microrings together, however, surface roughness of the wave-guides, and defects in the coupler geometry routinely induce splitting of the cavity modes due to backscattering and backcoupling. The parasitic back-propagating mode in the microring leads to hybridisation of the modes,…
We investigate entangled photon pair generation in a lossy microring resonator using an input-output formalism based on the work of Raymer and McKinstrie (Phys. Rev. A 88, 043819 (2013)) and Alsing, et al. (Phys. Rev. A 95, 053828 (2017)) that incorporates circulation factors that account for the multiple round trips of the fields within the cavity. We consider the nonlinear processes of spontaneous parametric down conversion and spontaneous four wave mixing, and we compute the generated biphoton signal-idler state from a single bus microring resonator, along with the generation, coincidence-t…
The propagation of short lightpulses in waveguiding structures with optical feedback, in our case optical microresonators, has been studied theoretically and experimentally. It appears that, dependent on the measurement set-up, ballistic transport or interference in the time domain of fs and ps laser pulses can be observed. The experiments are analyzed in terms of characteristic time scales of the source, the waveguide device and the detector arrangement and are related to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Based on this analysis a criterion is given for the upper bitrate for error free data …
We describe the design and fabrication of a scalable atom-light photonic interface based on a silicon nitride microring resonator on a transparent silicon dioxide-nitride multi-layer membrane. This new photonic platform is fully compatible with freespace cold atom laser cooling, stable trapping, and sorting at around $100~$nm from the microring surface, permitting the formation of an organized, strongly interacting atom-photonic hybrid lattice. We demonstrate small radius ($R\sim$16$μ$m) microring and racetrack resonators with a high quality factor $Q=3.2\times 10^5$, projecting a single atom …
The absence of the single-photon nonlinearity has been a major roadblock in developing quantum photonic circuits at optical frequencies. In this paper, we demonstrate a periodically-poled thin film lithium niobate microring resonator (PPLNMR) that reaches 5,000,000%/W second harmonic conversion efficiency---almost 20-fold enhancement over the state-of-the-art---by accessing its largest $χ^{(2)}$ tensor component $d_{33}$ via quasi-phase matching. The corresponding single photon coupling rate $g/2π$ is estimated to be 1.2 MHz, which is an important milestone as it approaches the dissipation rat…
Compact silicon integrated devices, such as micro-ring resonators, have recently been demonstrated as efficient sources of quantum correlated photon pairs. The mass production of integrated devices demands the implementation of fast and reliable techniques to monitor the device performances. In the case of time-energy correlations, this is particularly challenging, as it requires high spectral resolution that is not currently achievable in coincidence measurements. Here we reconstruct the joint spectral density of photons pairs generated by spontaneous four-wave mixing in a silicon ring resona…
In this work we examine the entanglement of the output signal-idler squeezed vacuum state in the Heisenberg picture as a function of the coupling and internal propagation loss parameters of a microring resonator. Using the log-negativity as a measure of entanglement for a mixed Gaussian state, we examine the competitive effects of the transfer matrix that encodes the classical phenomenological loss, as well as the matrix that that incorporates the coupling and internal propagation loss due to the quantum Langevin noise fields required to preserve unitarity of the composite system,(signal-idler…
Lithium niobate (LN), dubbed by many as the silicon of photonics, has recently risen to the forefront of chip-scale nonlinear optics research since its demonstration as an ultralow-loss integrated photonics platform. Due to its significant quadratic nonlinearity ($χ^{(2)}$), LN inspires many important applications such as second-harmonic generation (SHG), spontaneous parametric down-conversion, and optical parametric oscillation. Here, we demonstrate high-efficiency SHG in dual-resonant, periodically poled z-cut LN microrings, where quasi-phase matching is realized by field-assisted domain eng…
The future of integrated quantum photonics relies heavily on the ability to engineer refined methods for preparing the quantum states needed to implement various quantum protocols. An important example of such states are quantum-correlated photon pairs, which can be efficiently generated using spontaneous nonlinear processes in integrated microring-resonator structures. In this work, we propose a method for generating spectrally unentangled photon pairs from a standard microring resonator. The method utilizes interference between a primary and a delayed secondary pump pulse to effectively incr…
We present a detailed analysis of strongly driven spontaneous four-wave mixing in a lossy integrated microring resonator side-coupled to a channel waveguide. A nonperturbative, analytic solution within the undepleted pump approximation is developed for a cw pump input of arbitrary intensity. In the strongly driven regime self- and cross-phase modulation, as well as multi-pair generation, lead to a rich variety of power-dependent effects; the results are markedly different than in the low power limit. The photon pair generation rate, single photon spectrum, and joint spectral intensity (JSI) di…
Microring resonators are attractive for low-power frequency conversion via Bragg-scattering four-wave-mixing due to their comb-like resonance spectrum. However, conversion efficiency is limited to 50% due to the equal probability of up- and down-conversion. Here, we demonstrate how two coupled microrings enable highly directional conversion between the spectral modes of one of the rings. An extinction between up- and down-conversion of more than 40 dB is experimentally observed. Based on this method, we propose a design for on-chip multiplexed single-photon sources that allow localized frequen…
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…
We propose a scalable version of a KLM CNOT gate based upon integrated waveguide microring resonators (MRR), vs the original KLM-approach using beam splitters (BS). The core element of our CNOT gate is a nonlinear phase-shift gate (NLPSG) using three MRRs, which we examine in detail. We find an expanded parameter space for the NLPSG over that of the conventional version. Whereas in all prior proposals for bulk optical realizations of the NLPSG the optimal operating point is precisely a single zero dimensional manifold within the parameter space of the device, we find conditions for effective t…
We present a quantized quasinormal approach to rigorously describe coupled lossy resonators, and quantify the quantum coupling parameters as a function of distance between the resonators. We also make a direct connection between classical and quantum quasinormal modes parameters and theories, offering new and unique insights into coupled open cavity resonators. We present detailed calculations for coupled microdisk resonators and show striking interference effects that depend on the phase of the quasinormal modes, an effect that is also significant for high quality factor modes. Our results de…
In a quantum network, a key challenge is to minimize the direct reflection of flying qubits as they couple to stationary, resonator-based memory qubits, as the reflected amplitude represents state transfer infidelity that cannot be directly recovered. Optimizing the transfer fidelity can be accomplished by dynamically varying the resonator's coupling rate to the flying qubit field. Here, we analytically derive the optimal coupling rate profile in the presence of intrinsic loss of the quantum memory using an open quantum systems method that can account for intrinsic resonator losses. We show th…
We investigate theoretically the temporal evolution of a squeezed state in lossy coupled-cavity systems. We present a general formalism based upon the tight binding approximation and apply this to a two-cavity system as well as to a coupled resonator optical waveguide in a photonic crystal. We derive analytical expressions for the number of photons and the quadrature noise in each cavity as a function of time when the initial excited state is a squeezed state in one of the cavities. We also analytically evaluate the time dependant cross correlation between the photons in different cavities to …
Interfacing solid-state emitters with photonic structures is a key strategy for developing highly efficient photonic quantum technologies. Such structures are often organised into two distinct categories: nanocavities and waveguides. However, any realistic nanocavity structure simultaneously has characteristics of both a cavity and waveguide, which is particularly pronounced when the cavity is constructed using low-reflectivity mirrors in a waveguide structure with good transverse light confinement. In this regime, standard cavity quantum optics theory breaks down, as the waveguide character o…
We investigate the steady states of a lossy array of nonlinear optical resonators that are driven by lasers and interact via mutual photon tunneling. For weak nonlinearities, we find two-mode squeezing of polaritons in modes whose quasi-momenta match the relative phases of the laser drives. For strong nonlinearities the spatial polariton density-density correlations indicate that the polaritons crystallize and are predominantly found at a specific distance from each other despite being injected by a coherent light source and damped by the environment.
In the presence of arbitrary three-dimensional linear media with material loss and amplification, we present an electromagnetic field quantization scheme for quasinormal modes (QNMs), extending previous work for lossy media [Franke et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 213901 (2019)]. Applying a symmetrization transformation, we show two fundamentally different ways for constructing a QNM photon Fock space, including (i) where there is a separate operator basis for both gain and loss, and (ii) where the loss and gain degrees of freedom are combined into a single basis. These QNM operator bases are sub…
A scheme for heralded generation of frequency-bin photonic qubits via spontaneous four-wave mixing in a system of coupled microring resonators (photonic molecule) is developed so that the qubit state is fully controlled by the frequency amplitude of the pump field. It is shown that coupling parameters of the photonic molecule can be optimized to provide generation of nearly pure heralded photons. The heralded qubit state does not depend on the microring resonator mode frequency, thereby allowing to take advantage of frequency multiplexing for improving efficiency of quantum information process…
We show that coherent control of the steady-state long-distance entanglement between pairs of cavity-atom systems in an array of lossy and driven coupled resonators is possible. The cavities are doped with atoms and are connected through wave guides, other cavities or fibers depending on the implementation. We find that the steady-state entanglement can be coherently controlled through the tuning of the phase difference between the driving fields. It can also be surprisingly high in spite of the pumps being classical fields. For some implementations where the connecting element can be a fiber,…
