Polarized indistinguishable single photons from a quantum dot in an elliptical micropillar

Abstract

The key challenge to scalable optical quantum computing, boson sampling, and quantum metrology is sources of single photons with near-unity system efficiency and simultaneously near-perfect indistinguishability in all degrees of freedom (including spectral, temporal, spatial, and polarization). However, previous high-indistinguishability solid-state single-photon sources had to rely on polarization filtering that reduced the system efficiency by at least 50%. Here, we overcome this challenge by developing a new single-photon source based on a coherently driven quantum dot embedded in an elliptical micropillar. The asymmetric cavity lifts the polarization degeneracy into two orthogonal linearly polarized modes with a suitable energy separation. We design an excitation-collection scheme that allows the creation and collection of single photons with an indistinguishability of 0.976(1) and a degree of polarization of 91%. Our method provides a solution of combining near-unity system efficiency and indistinguishability compatible with background-free resonant excitation, and opens the way to truly optimal single-photon sources for scalable photonic quantum technologies.

arXiv commentsubmitted for publication on 8 August 2018

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• On-demand semiconductor source of entangled photons which simultaneously has high fidelity, efficiency, and indistinguishability
• Coherently driving a single quantum two-level system with dichromatic laser pulses
• Experimental Gaussian Boson Sampling
• Extended polarized semiclassical model for quantum-dot cavity QED and its application to single-photon sources