Programmable silicon photonic sources of frequency bin entangled qubits and qudits
Résumé
Frequency bin encoding is becoming of widespread use in photonic quantum applications due to its strong noise resilience, the large information content that can be encoded per photon, and the inherent parallelism through which gates can be applied over multiple frequency modes. Ideally, sources of frequency bin qubits and qudits should be programmable, have high brightness, and have tightly spaced spectral modes to be useful for quantum algorithms. Here we present an integrated photonic device that simultaneously met all these requirement. We exploit the coherent generation of photon pairs over multiple ring resonators to overcome the trade-offs that hurdle single resonators. Harnessing the dense integration and phase stability of silicon photonics, we demonstrate a photon pair source of frequency bin qudits and qudits with simultaneously high brightness, fidelity, and purity.