Coalescence of single photons emitted by disparate single-photon sources: the example of InAs quantum dots and parametric down-conversion sources

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Oct 7;107(15):157402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.157402. Epub 2011 Oct 5.

Abstract

Single photons produced by fundamentally dissimilar physical processes will in general not be indistinguishable. We show how photons produced from a quantum dot and by parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal can be manipulated to be indistinguishable. The measured two-photon coalescence probability is 16%, and is limited by quantum-dot decoherence. Temporal filtering to the quantum-dot coherence time and accounting for detector time response increases this to 61% while retaining 25% of the events. This technique can connect different elements in a scalable quantum network.