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arXiv · 1811.10962

Nanomechanical single-photon routing

Abstract

The merger between integrated photonics and quantum optics promises new opportunities within photonic quantum technology with the very significant progress on excellent photon-emitter interfaces and advanced optical circuits. A key missing functionality is rapid circuitry reconfigurability that ultimately does not introduce loss or emitter decoherence, and operating at a speed matching the photon generation and quantum memory storage time of the on-chip quantum emitter. This ambitious goal requires entirely new active quantum-photonic devices by extending the traditional approaches to reconfigurability. Here, by merging nano-optomechanics and deterministic photon-emitter interfaces we demonstrate on-chip single-photon routing with low loss, small device footprint, and an intrinsic time response approaching the spin coherence time of solid-state quantum emitters. 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.

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Camille Papon, Xiaoyan Zhou, Henri Thyrrestrup, Zhe Liu, Søren Stobbe, Rüdiger Schott, Andreas D. Wieck, Arne Ludwig, Peter Lodahl, Leonardo Midolo. 2018-11-27. Nanomechanical single-photon routing. https://doi.org/10.1364/optica.6.000524

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