Nanomechanical single-photon routing

Camille Papon, Xiaoyan Zhou, Henri Thyrrestrup, Zhe Liu, Søren Stobbe, Ruediger Schott, Andreas D Wieck, Arne Ludwig, Peter Lodahl, Leonardo Midolo*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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    Abstract

    The active routing of photons using rapid reconfigurable integrated circuits is a key functionality for quantum-information processing. Typical waveguide-based optical switches rely on the modulation of the refractive index, producing a modest variation of the phase of the optical fields. Mechanical motion of nanophotonic structures, on the contrary, can be tailored to produce a much larger effect, without introducing loss or emitter decoherence and operating at a speed matching the quantum memory storage time of the on-chip quantum emitter. Here we demonstrate a compact and low-loss nano-opto-electromechanical single-photon router, based on two coupled waveguides whose distance is adjusted on demand by an external voltage. We show controllable two-port routing of single photons emitted from quantum dots embedded in the same chip. We report a maximum splitting ratio >23 dB, insertion loss of 0.67 dB, and sub-microsecond response time. The device is an essential building block for constructing advanced quantum photonic architectures on-chip, towards, e.g., coherent multi-photon sources, deterministic photon- photon quantum gates, quantum-repeater nodes, or scalable quantum networks. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalOptica
    Volume6
    Issue number4
    Pages (from-to)524-530
    ISSN2334-2536
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2019

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