Photonic crystal waveguides as sources of counterpropagating factorizable biphoton states

Opt Lett. 2019 Jan 1;44(1):69-72. doi: 10.1364/OL.44.000069.

Abstract

We demonstrate numerically that photonic crystal slab waveguides can generate spectrally unentangled biphoton states, highly desired for heralding of single photons. We achieve this by modally phase matching a counterpropagating spontaneous parametric down-conversion process, in a fully integrated scheme and without the need for periodic poling. Such a configuration is an ideal integrated source of heralded single photons, as it spatially separates the photons of a pair at the source without any extra components, while allowing for generation of spectrally narrow photons on a very short length scale.