Telecommunications-band heralded single photons from a silicon nanophotonic chip

Abstract

We demonstrate room temperature heralded single photon generation in a CMOS-compatible silicon nanophotonic device. The strong modal confinement and slow group velocity provided by a coupled resonator optical waveguide produced a large four-wave-mixing nonlinearity coefficient γ eff ≈ 4100 W -1 m -1 at telecommunications wavelengths. Spontaneous four-wave-mixing using a degenerate pump beam at 1549.6 nm created photon pairs at 1529.5 nm and 1570.5 nm with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeding 20. A photon correlation measurement of the signal (1529.5 nm) photons heralded by the detection of the idler (1570.5 nm) photons showed antibunching with g (2)(0) = 0. 19 ± 0. 03. The demonstration of a single photon source within a silicon platform holds promise for future integrated quantum photonic circuits. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.