Entangled photon pair generation in an integrated SiC platform

Anouar Rahmouni; Ruixuan Wang; Jingwei Li; Xiao Tang; Thomas Gerrits; Oliver Slattery; Qing Li; Lijun Ma

doi:10.1038/s41377-024-01443-z

Entangled photon pair generation in an integrated SiC platform

Light Sci Appl. 2024 May 9;13(1):110. doi: 10.1038/s41377-024-01443-z.

Authors

Anouar Rahmouni¹, Ruixuan Wang², Jingwei Li², Xiao Tang³, Thomas Gerrits³, Oliver Slattery³, Qing Li⁴, Lijun Ma⁵

Affiliations

¹ National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Dr, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899, USA. anouar.rahmouni@nist.gov.
² Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
³ National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Dr, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899, USA.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA. qingli2@andrew.cmu.edu.
⁵ National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Dr, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899, USA. lijun.ma@nist.gov.

Abstract

Entanglement plays a vital role in quantum information processing. Owing to its unique material properties, silicon carbide recently emerged as a promising candidate for the scalable implementation of advanced quantum information processing capabilities. To date, however, only entanglement of nuclear spins has been reported in silicon carbide, while an entangled photon source, whether it is based on bulk or chip-scale technologies, has remained elusive. Here, we report the demonstration of an entangled photon source in an integrated silicon carbide platform for the first time. Specifically, strongly correlated photon pairs are efficiently generated at the telecom C-band wavelength through implementing spontaneous four-wave mixing in a compact microring resonator in the 4H-silicon-carbide-on-insulator platform. The maximum coincidence-to-accidental ratio exceeds 600 at a pump power of 0.17 mW, corresponding to a pair generation rate of (9 ± 1) × 10³ pairs/s. Energy-time entanglement is created and verified for such signal-idler photon pairs, with the two-photon interference fringes exhibiting a visibility larger than 99%. The heralded single-photon properties are also measured, with the heralded g⁽²⁾(0) on the order of 10^-3, demonstrating the SiC platform as a prospective fully integrated, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible single-photon source for quantum applications.