Deterministic and Robust Generation of Single Photons from a Single Quantum Dot with 99.5% Indistinguishability Using Adiabatic Rapid Passage

• Published in: Nano letters 2014-11, Vol.14 (11), p.6515-6519
• Main Authors: Wei, Yu-Jia, He, Yu-Ming, Chen, Ming-Cheng, Hu, Yi-Nan, He, Yu, Wu, Dian, Schneider, Christian, Kamp, Martin, Höfling, Sven, Lu, Chao-Yang, Pan, Jian-Wei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adiabatic flow; Applied sciences; Computation; Cross-disciplinary physics: materials science; rheology; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Fault tolerance; Interference; Materials science; Molecular electronics, nanoelectronics; Nanocrystalline materials; Nanoscale materials and structures: fabrication and characterization; Photons; Physics; Quantum computing; Quantum dots; Qubits (quantum computing); Qunatum dots; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Semiconductors
• ISSN: 1530-6984; 1530-6992
• DOI: 10.1021/nl503081n

Single photons are attractive candidates of quantum bits (qubits) for quantum computation and are the best messengers in quantum networks. Future scalable, fault-tolerant photonic quantum technologies demand both stringently high levels of photon indistinguishability and generation efficiency. Here, we demonstrate deterministic and robust generation of pulsed resonance fluorescence single photons from a single semiconductor quantum dot using adiabatic rapid passage, a method robust against fluctuation of driving pulse area and dipole moments of solid-state emitters. The emitted photons are background-free, have a vanishing two-photon emission probability of 0.3% and a raw (corrected) two-photon Hong–Ou–Mandel interference visibility of 97.9% (99.5%), reaching a precision that places single photons at the threshold for fault-tolerant surface-code quantum computing. This single-photon source can be readily scaled up to multiphoton entanglement and used for quantum metrology, boson sampling, and linear optical quantum computing.