A Single Photon Source Testbed for Quantum Computing and Quantum Information Processing
Principal Investigator: Stephen Cronin
Co-PIs: Tony Levi, Todd Brun, Daniel Lidar, Michelle Povinelli, Alan Willner, John O’Brien, Wei Wu
Sponsored:11/1/13 - 10/31/14 (1 year)
This proposal aims to build an electrically-driven single photon source testbed at USC. Single photon sources are an essential building block for quantum information processing. Currently, there are no off-the-shelf components capable of producing single photons in a controllable way. As a result, a vast majority of the existing work in the field has been theoretical rather than experimental. The proposed single photon source testbed will enable various algorithms that have previously been put forth theoretically to be implemented experimentally. Experiments that will be carried out under this award include the following: 1.) measure the key metrics for evaluating the quality of the single photon source. In addition to delay and jitter, the second-order correlation function (g(2)(τ)) will be measured, which represents the probability of multiphoton emission. 2.) assess indistiguishibility in carbon nanotube single photon sources, 3.) explore fundamental behavior and transient dynamics of single photons in photonic and optoelectronic devices, 4.) integrated photonics for on-chip quantum information processing, and 5.) evaluate optical communications in the single photon limit.
Image: Schematic diagram of the carbon nanotube pn-junction single photon emitter device.