Semiconductor sources of twin photons for quantum information

Abstract

A large number of scientific proposals made in the last few years are based on transport and manipulation of information using single quantum objects. Some of them make use of entanglement in pairs of particles such as twin photons.Although theoretical proposals have demonstrated highly interesting perspectives in the quantum information domain, experimental realizations and applications still suffer from the complexity of experimental set-ups and technological limitations. This paper presents various approaches aiming at efficient twin photon semiconductor sources. The emergence of these compact and integrated devices would be an important technological breakthrough in quantum information applications.

Semiconductor Ridge Microcavities Generating Counterpropagating Entangled Photons

“…With respect to this technique, parametric generation in semiconductor waveguides allows room-temperature operation and a high directionality of the emission, which dramatically enhances the collection efficiency. Several phase-matching schemes have been demonstrated in these systems (Ducci et al, 2005): form birefringence, modal phase matching, counterpropagating phase matching. In particular, the last one has attracted a deal of attention because of its unusual flexibility in the control of the quantum properties of the emitted photons (Walton et al, 2003;Walton et al, 2004;Perina, 2008).…”