Tommaso Lunghi

Quantum photonics at telecom wavelengths based on lithium niobate waveguides

Integrated optical components on lithium niobate play a major role in standard high-speed communication systems. Over the last two decades, after the birth and positioning of quantum information science, lithium niobate waveguide architectures have emerged as one of the key platforms for enabling photonics quantum technologies. Due to mature technological processes for waveguide structure integration, as well as inherent and efficient properties for nonlinear optical effects, lithium niobate devices are nowadays at the heart of many photon-pair or triplet sources, single-photon detectors, coherent wavelength-conversion interfaces, and quantum memories. Consequently, they find applications in advanced and complex quantum communication systems, where compactness, stability, efficiency, and interconnectability with other guided-wave technologies are required. In this review paper, we first introduce the material aspects of lithium niobate, and subsequently discuss all of the above mentioned quantum components, ranging from standard photon-pair sources to more complex and advanced circuits.

High-quality photonic entanglement for wavelength-multiplexed quantum communication based on a silicon chip

We report an efficient energy-time entangled photon-pair source based on four-wave mixing in a CMOS-compatible silicon photonics ring resonator. Thanks to suitable optimization, the source shows a large spectral brightness of 400 pairs of entangled photons /s/MHz for 500 μW pump power, compatible with standard telecom dense wavelength division multiplexers. We demonstrate high-purity energy-time entanglement, i.e., free of photonic noise, with near perfect raw visibilities (> 98%) between various channel pairs in the telecom C-band. Such a compact source stands as a path towards more complex quantum photonic circuits dedicated to quantum communication systems.We report an efficient energy-time entangled photon-pair source based on four-wave mixing in a CMOS-compatible silicon photonics ring resonator. Thanks to suitable optimization, the source shows a large spectral brightness of 400 pairs of entangled photons /s/MHz for 500 μW pump power, compatible with standard telecom dense wavelength division multiplexers. We demonstrate high-purity energy-time entanglement, i.e., free of photonic noise, with near perfect raw visibilities (> 98%) between various channel pairs in the telecom C-band. Such a compact source stands as a path towards more complex quantum photonic circuits dedicated to quantum communication systems.

Entanglement distribution over 150 km in wavelength division multiplexed channels for quantum cryptography

Granting information privacy is of crucial importance in our society, notably in fiber communication networks. Quantum cryptography provides a unique means to establish, at remote locations, identical strings of genuine random bits, with a level of secrecy unattainable using classical resources. However, several constraints, such as non-optimized photon number statistics and resources, detectors noise, and optical losses, currently limit the performances in terms of both achievable secret key rates and distances. Here, these issues are addressed using an approach that combines both fundamental and off-the-shelves technological resources. High-quality bipartite photonic entanglement is distributed over a 150 km fiber link, exploiting a wavelength demultiplexing strategy implemented at the end-user locations. It is shown how coincidence rates scale linearly with the number of employed telecommunication channels, with values outperforming previous realizations by almost one order of magnitude. Thanks to its potential of scalability and compliance with device-independent strategies, this system is ready for real quantum applications, notably entanglement-based quantum cryptography.

On-chip generation of heralded photon-number states

Beyond the use of genuine monolithic integrated optical platforms, we report here a hybrid strategy enabling on-chip generation of configurable heralded two-photon states. More specifically, we combine two different fabrication techniques, i.e., non-linear waveguides on lithium niobate for efficient photon-pair generation and femtosecond-laser-direct-written waveguides on glass for photon manipulation. Through real-time device manipulation capabilities, a variety of path-coded heralded two-photon states can be produced, ranging from product to entangled states. Those states are engineered with high levels of purity, assessed by fidelities of 99.5u2009±u20098% and 95.0u2009±u20098%, respectively, obtained via quantum interferometric measurements. Our strategy therefore stands as a milestone for further exploiting entanglement-based protocols, relying on engineered quantum states, and enabled by scalable and compatible photonic circuits.

Optimal analysis of ultra broadband energy-time entanglement for high bit-rate dense wavelength division multiplexed quantum networks

We demonstrate an experimental method for measuring energy-time entanglement over almost 80u2009nm spectral bandwidth in a single shot with a quantum bit error rate below 0.5%. Our scheme is extremely cost-effective and efficient in terms of resources as it employs only one source of entangled photons and one fixed unbalanced interferometer per phase-coded analysis basis. We show that the maximum analysis spectral bandwidth is obtained when the analysis interferometers are properly unbalanced, a strategy which can be straightforwardly applied to most of todays experiments based on energy-time and time-bin entanglement. Our scheme has therefore a great potential for boosting bit rates and reducing the resource overhead of future entanglement-based quantum key distribution systems.

Fully guided-wave photon pair source for quantum applications

We report a fully guided-wave source of polarisation entangled photons based on a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide mounted in a Sagnac interferometer. We demonstrate the sources quality by converting polarisation entanglement to postselection-free energy-time entanglement for which we obtain a near-optimal S-parameter of 2.75 ± 0.02, i.e. a violation of the Bell inequality by more than 35 standard deviations. The exclusive use of guided-wave components makes our source compact and stable which is a prerequisite for increasingly complex quantum applications. Additionally, our source offers a great versatility in terms of photon pair emission spectrum and generated quantum state, making it suitable for a broad range of quantum applications such as cryptography and metrology. In this sense, we show how to use our source for chromatic dispersion measurements in optical fibres which opens new avenues in the field of quantum metrology.

Broadband integrated beam splitter using spatial adiabatic passage

Light routing and manipulation are important aspects of integrated optics. They essentially rely on beam splitters which are at the heart of interferometric setups and active routing. The most common implementations of beam splitters suffer either from strong dispersive response (directional couplers) or tight fabrication tolerances (multimode interference couplers). In this paper we fabricate a robust and simple broadband integrated beam splitter based on lithium niobate with a splitting ratio achromatic over more than 130 nm. Our architecture is based on spatial adiabatic passage, a technique originally used to transfer entirely an optical beam from a waveguide to another one that has been shown to be remarkably robust against fabrication imperfections and wavelength dispersion. Our device shows a splitting ratio of 0.52±0.03 and 0.48±0.03 from 1500 nm up to 1630 nm. Furthermore, we show that suitable design enables the splitting in output beams with relative phase 0 or π. Thanks to their independence to material dispersion, these devices represent simple, elementary components to create achromatic and versatile photonic circuits.

Soft-proton exchange on magnesium-oxide-doped substrates: A route toward efficient and power-resistant nonlinear converters

Despite their attractive features, integrated optical devices based on Congruent-melted Lithium Niobate (CLN) suffer from Photo-Refractive Damage (PRD). This light-induced refractive-index change hampers the use of CLN when high-power densities are in play, a typical regime in integrated optics. In bulk devices, the resistance to PRD can be largely improved by doping the lithium-niobate substrates with magnesium oxide. However, the fabrication of waveguides on MgO-doped substrates is not as straightforward as on CLN and either the resistance to PRD is strongly reduced by the waveguide fabrication process (as it happens in Ti-indiffused waveguides) or the nonlinear conversion efficiency is lowered (as it occurs in annealed-proton exchange). Here, we fabricate waveguides starting from MgO-doped substrates using the Soft-Proton Exchange (SPE) technique and we show that this combination represents a promising alternative. We demonstrate that, with a small adaptation of the exchange parameters, SPE allows prod...

Silicon photonics : generation of entangled photon pairs

A prediction and observational evidence for the mass of a dark matter particle are presented.T validity of quantum-mechanical predictions has been confirmed with a high degree of accuracy in a wide range of experiments. Although the statistics of the outcomes of a measuring apparatus have been studied intensively, little has been explored and is known regarding the accessibility of quantum dynamics and the evolutions of a quantum system during measurements. For this sort of fundamental studies of quantum mechanics, interferometric and polarimetric approaches, in particular by the use of neutron’s matter-waves, provide almost ideal experimental circumstances. The former device explicitly exhibits quantum interference between spatially separated beams in a macroscopic scale. In contrast, interference effects between two spin eigenstates are exposed in the latter apparatus. Exploiting both strategies, alternative theories of quantum mechanics, Kochen-Specker theorem and so on are studied. Recently, as a study of quantum dynamics, neutron interferometer experiments are carried out: A new counter-intuitive phenomenon, called quantum Cheshire-cat, is observed. Moreover, extending the first experimental test of the new error-disturbance uncertainty relation by using a modified neutron polarimeter setup, we performed experiments investigating the validity of an extended uncertainty relation for mixed ensemble as well as a new noise-disturbance uncertainty relation in an entropic form. In my talk, I am going to give an overview of matter-wave optical approach to investigations of fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics.We will discuss a novel entangled photon pair source based on an on-chip silicon ring resonator, enabling the distribution of wavelength multiplexed quantum information in standard telecommunication channels. This source opens the route towards out-of-the laboratory quantum cryptography systems showing augmented bit rates.