Sahand Mahmoodian

Interfacing single photons and single quantum dots with photonic nanostructures

Photonic nanostructures provide means of tailoring the interaction between light and matter and the past decade has witnessed a tremendous experimental and theoretical progress in this subject. In particular, the combination with semiconductor quantum dots has proven successful. This manuscript reviews quantum optics with excitons in single quantum dots embedded in photonic nanostructures. The ability to engineer the light-matter interaction strength in integrated photonic nanostructures enables a range of fundamental quantum-electrodynamics experiments on, e.g., spontaneous-emission control, modified Lamb shifts, and enhanced dipole-dipole interaction. Furthermore, highly efficient single-photon sources and giant photon nonlinearities may be implemented with immediate applications for photonic quantum-information processing. The review summarizes the general theoretical framework of photon emission including the role of dephasing processes, and applies it to photonic nanostructures of current interest, such as photonic-crystal cavities and waveguides, dielectric nanowires, and plasmonic waveguides. The introduced concepts are generally applicable in quantum nanophotonics and apply to a large extent also to other quantum emitters, such as molecules, nitrogen vacancy ceters, or atoms. Finally, the progress and future prospects of applications in quantum-information processing are considered.

Deterministic photon–emitter coupling in chiral photonic circuits

Engineering photon emission and scattering is central to modern photonics applications ranging from light harvesting to quantum-information processing. To this end, nanophotonic waveguides are well suited as they confine photons to a one-dimensional geometry and thereby increase the light-matter interaction. In a regular waveguide, a quantum emitter interacts equally with photons in either of the two propagation directions. This symmetry is violated in nanophotonic structures in which non-transversal local electric-field components imply that photon emission and scattering may become directional. Here we show that the helicity of the optical transition of a quantum emitter determines the direction of single-photon emission in a specially engineered photonic-crystal waveguide. We observe single-photon emission into the waveguide with a directionality that exceeds 90% under conditions in which practically all the emitted photons are coupled to the waveguide. The chiral light-matter interaction enables deterministic and highly directional photon emission for experimentally achievable on-chip non-reciprocal photonic elements. These may serve as key building blocks for single-photon optical diodes, transistors and deterministic quantum gates. Furthermore, chiral photonic circuits allow the dissipative preparation of entangled states of multiple emitters for experimentally achievable parameters, may lead to novel topological photon states and could be applied for directional steering of light.

Single-photon non-linear optics with a quantum dot in a waveguide

Strong non-linear interactions between photons enable logic operations for both classical and quantum-information technology. Unfortunately, non-linear interactions are usually feeble and therefore all-optical logic gates tend to be inefficient. A quantum emitter deterministically coupled to a propagating mode fundamentally changes the situation, since each photon inevitably interacts with the emitter, and highly correlated many-photon states may be created. Here we show that a single quantum dot in a photonic-crystal waveguide can be used as a giant non-linearity sensitive at the single-photon level. The non-linear response is revealed from the intensity and quantum statistics of the scattered photons, and contains contributions from an entangled photon–photon bound state. The quantum non-linearity will find immediate applications for deterministic Bell-state measurements and single-photon transistors and paves the way to scalable waveguide-based photonic quantum-computing architectures.

Coated photonic bandgap fibres for low-index sensing applications: cutoff analysis.

We investigate theoretically the performance of photonic crystal fibres with coated holes as refractive index sensors. We show that coating the holes with a high-index material allows to extend the extreme sensitivities analyte-waveguide based geometries offer to the case of low-index analytes, including water-based solutions. As the sensitivity of these sensors is intricately linked to the sensitivity of the cutoff of a single inclusion to the analyte refractive index, our approach relies on the derivation of cutoff equations for coated inclusions. This is performed analytically without approximations, in the fully vectorial case, for modes of all orders. Our analytic approach allows us to rapidly cover the parameter space, and to quickly identify promising geometries. The best results are obtained when considering fluorinated polymer fibres, for which the index of the background material is not too different to that of water, and with thin high-index coatings. Using these results, we propose a sensor based on a directional coupler geometry that would lead to a sensitivity of 2.2 x 10(4) nm/RIU for water based solutions with achievable smallest detectable refractive index changes below 10(-6).

Quantum networks with chiral light{matter interaction in waveguides

We propose a scalable architecture for a quantum network based on a simple on-chip photonic circuit that performs loss-tolerant two-qubit measurements. The circuit consists of two quantum emitters positioned in the arms of an on-chip Mach-Zehnder interferometer composed of waveguides with chiral-light-matter interfaces. The efficient chiral-light-matter interaction allows the emitters to perform high-fidelity intranode two-qubit parity measurements within a single chip and to emit photons to generate internode entanglement, without any need for reconfiguration. We show that, by connecting multiple circuits of this kind into a quantum network, it is possible to perform universal quantum computation with heralded two-qubit gate fidelities F∼0.998 achievable in state-of-the-art quantum dot systems.

Photon Sorting, Efficient Bell Measurements, and a Deterministic Controlled-Z Gate Using a Passive Two-Level Nonlinearity

Although the strengths of optical non-linearities available experimentally have been rapidly increasing in recent years, significant challenges remain to using such non-linearities to produce useful quantum devices such as efficient optical Bell state analysers or universal quantum optical gates. Here we describe a new approach that avoids the current limitations by combining strong non-linearities with active Gaussian operations in efficient protocols for Bell state analysers and Controlled-Sign gates.

Engineering chiral light–matter interaction in photonic crystal waveguides with slow light

We design photonic crystal waveguides with efficient chiral light--matter interfaces that can be integrated with solid-state quantum emitters. By using glide-plane-symmetric waveguides, we show that chiral light-matter interaction can exist even in the presence of slow light with slow-down factors of up to

Coupled waveguide modes in hexagonal photonic crystals

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Paired modes of heterostructure cavities in photonic crystal waveguides with split band edges

and therefore the light--matter interaction exhibits both strong Purcell enhancement and chirality. This allows for near-unity directional

Modes of Shallow Photonic Crystal Waveguides: Semi-Analytic Treatment

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