Applied Physics Express

LETTER

An on-chip photon-pair source with negligible two photon absorption

To cite this article: Kenta Sugiura et al 2019 Appl. Phys. Express 12 022006

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Applied Physics Express 12, 022006 (2019) LETTER
https://doi.org/10.7567/1882-0786/aafa0f

An on-chip photon-pair source with negligible two photon absorption

Kenta Sugiura1, Ryo Okamoto1,2, Labao Zhang3, Lin Kang3, Jian Chen3, Peiheng Wu3, Sai T. Chu4, Brent E. Little5, and
Shigeki Takeuchi1*
1
Department of Electronic Science and Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto Daigaku-Katsura, Nishikyo-ku, Kyoto 615-8510, Japan
2
PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, 4-1-8 Honcho, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan
3
Research Institute of Superconductor Electronics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, People’s Republic of China
4
Department of Physics, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China
5
State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Science, Xi’an,
People’s Republic of China
*
E-mail: takeuchi@kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Received October 31, 2018; accepted December 18, 2018; published online January 25, 2019

While photon-pair sources using silicon waveguides have shown great promise, strong two-photon absorption (TPA) may limit their brightness.
Recently, high-index contrast doped glass (HICDG) has attracted attention because of its CMOS compatibility and low propagation loss. It is also
expected that TPA in HICDG is small, though it has not yet been directly measured by conventionally used CW pumping. In this paper, we report
that the estimated genuine coincidence events by photon-pairs increase quadratically as the pump power increased and do not show any
saturation behavior up to 100 mW CW pump power. © 2019 The Japan Society of Applied Physics

P
hoton-pair sources are indispensable tools for photonic
quantum circuit1–4) and quantum metrology.5,6) Due to
their scalability and stability, integrated photon-pair
sources fabricated by CMOS compatible processes are con-
sidered promising.7,8) Although a silicon waveguide is one of
the promising platforms,9–12) strong two-photon absorption
(TPA) in the silicon waveguide13) may limit the brightness of
photon-pair sources. One solution to this problem is to use
silicon nitride (SiN), which is expected to have small TPA, and
high-Q ring resonators for nonlinear optical phenomena have
been reported.14,15)
High-index contrast doped glass (HICDG) is another
attractive CMOS compatible platform for on-chip photon-
pair source,16,17) which is often referred to as Hydex®.18)
When it is compared to SiN, the nonlinearity of HICDG is
slightly lower than that of SiN but the propagation loss is
smaller.7) The detailed comparison of these platforms can be
found in the literature.7) HICDG is also expected to have a
small TPA compared to silicon.7) It has been reported that
with pulsed excitation using a self-locked scheme19) with a
9.8 MHz repetition rate, no saturation is observed up to 1.5 W
of peak power, which corresponds to 3 mW of average power
for a device with a moderate Q factor (235,000). However,
there have been no reports on the effect of TPA with
commonly used CW pumping and for high-Q (Q > 106)
ring resonators.
In this paper, we report our experimental result on the
effect of saturation using a small line width (1 MHz) CW
pump laser for a high-Q (Q ∼1.0 × 106) HICDG ring
resonator using a setup with very high temperature stability
(Δ T ⩽ 1 mK). We observed no saturation up to 100 mW of
pump laser power. This power is technically limited by the
epoxy resin used to connect fibers to the device. We believe
our result is important for high-flux on-chip photon-pair
sources.
Figure 1(a) shows a schematic view of our 4-port HICDG
ring resonator. The core material is HICDG and the clad
material is SiO2. The refractive index of HICDG is 1.6. The
cross section of the waveguide is 2 μm × 2 μm. The waveguide
has very low linear propagation loss (∼0.06 dB cm−1).20) See
Refs. 20, 21 for more detailed information. The ring radius is
595 μm. Each port of the device is pigtailed with a single mode
022006-1
fiber. The coupling efficiency between the device and the fiber
is −0.97 dB/facet. We put the output of a CW tunable laser
(santec, TSL-710) to the INPUT port of the device and
measured the power at the THROUGH port using a power
meter (Newport, 2936-C). We then scanned the wavelength of
the laser in 0.2 pm steps. The measurement result is shown in
Fig. 1(b). As Fig. 1(b) illustrates, the free spectral range (FSR)
of our ring resonator is 0.4 nm (50 GHz). Figure 1(c) shows a
resonant dip with an FWHM of 1.1 pm. The quality factor
calculated from the resonant dip is ∼1.0 × 106.
Figure 2 shows a schematic of the experimental setup for the
observation of photon-pair generation. A CW laser with a
wavelength of 1550.2 nm is emitted from a tunable laser diode
(TLD, santec, TSL-210V) and is amplified by an erbium doped
fiber amplifier (EDFA, Alnair Labs, HPA-200C) and linearly
polarized by a polarization controller (PC). We used two sets of
bandpass filters (BPF, Haphit, bandwidth: 1550 ± 4 nm) to
produce a sufficient extinction ratio to suppress the noise
generated by the EDFA. The pump laser is injected into the
INPUT port of the HICDG ring resonator. The ambient
temperature of the ring resonator is controlled with an accuracy
of 1 mK. We adjust the frequency of the laser according to the
thermal drift of the resonant peak.22) The output photons from
the DROP port are separated by a 50:50 beam splitter and sent
to the BPFs to eliminate the pump lights. The center
wavelengths of the BPFs are 1560 nm and 1540 nm and the
bandwidth of both BPFs is 8 nm. The resonant modes of the
signal photons and idler photons are selected by tunable BPFs
(TBPF, WL Photonics, WLTF-NE-S-1590-120/0.11-SM-3.0/
0.5-FC/UPC), whose FWHMs of 0.12 nm are narrower than
the FSR of the ring resonator. The photons are detected by
superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (D1, D2)
made of niobium nitride nanowires and operated inside a
cryostat at 2.4 K.23) The system detection efficiencies of D1
and D2 are 14% and 10%, respectively. The dark counts are
less than 100 cps. Time-to-digital converter (TDC, ID
Quantique, id800) is used to record time-tag data. We
calculated the single counts and coincidence counts from the
time-tag data.
First, we measured the pump power dependence of the
photon number emitted from the HICDG ring resonator.
Figure 3 shows the pump power dependence of the single
© 2019 The Japan Society of Applied Physics
Appl. Phys. Express 12, 022006 (2019)
Fig. 1. (Color online) (a) 4-port high-index contrast doped glass (HICDG)
ring resonator. The ring radius is 595 μm. The cross section of the core is
2 μm × 2 μm. (b) Transmission spectrum of the HICDG ring resonator. The
FSR is 50 GHz. (c) The width of the resonant dip. FWHM = 1.1 pm and
central wavelength is 1.56 μm. The quality factor is ∼1.0 × 106.
Fig. 2. (Color online) Experimental setup for the observation of photon-
pair generation. TLD: tunable laser diode; EDFA: erbium doped fiber
amplifier; PC: polarization controller; BPF: bandpass filter; TBPF: tunable
BPF; D1, D2: superconducting nanowire single photon detector, TDC: time-
to-digital converter.
counts of signal and idler photons. The accumulation time
was set to 30 s. The horizontal axis shows the input power
measured before the coupling. The blue squares and red dots
are the number of photons detected by D1 and D2. The
022006-2
K. Sugiura et al.
Fig. 3. (Color online) Pump power dependence of the single counts. The
vertical axis is the number of detected counts. The horizontal axis is pump
power. (a) The blue squares show the number of signal photons. The blue line is
a quadratic polynomial fit to the data. (b) The red dots show the number of idler
photons. The red line is a quadratic polynomial fit to the data. The black dashed
lines in (a) and (b) show the linear terms and intercepts calculated from the
fitting results. The error bars are smaller than the marker size.
number of detected photons increases nonlinearly with the
pump power. Saturation was not observed for these pump
powers. The observed photon counts consist of the photons
generated via spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) pro-
cess and Raman scattering process. The number of photons
generated by SFWM and Raman scattering increase quad-
ratically and linearly as a function of pump power, respec-
tively. Thus, the single counts of signal and idler modes can
be written as,24,25)
Ns = hs (aP 2 + bs P ) + cs (1 )
Ni = h i (aP 2 + bi P ) + ci , (2 )
where Ns and Ni are the single counts of signal and idler
photons, respectively. a is the parameter for the quadratic term
and b is the parameter for the linear term. We used different
parameters for b since the efficiency of the Stokes Raman and
anti-Stokes Raman process may be different. aP2 represents the
number of photons with a pump power of P generated by
SFWM while bs(i) P represents the number generated by Raman
scattering. cs and ci are the dark counts of the detector and ηs
and ηi are the total efficiencies including the detection
efficiency and collection efficiency of the setup. The blue and
red lines in Fig. 3 are fitting curves by Eqs. (1) and (2) We
obtain hs a = 6.21 mW-2 , hs bs = 777 mW-1, cs = 584 cps,
© 2019 The Japan Society of Applied Physics
Appl. Phys. Express 12, 022006 (2019)
Fig. 4. (Color online) Pump power dependence of coincidence events. The
horizontal axis is the pump power measured before the coupling. The black
squares show the measured coincidence counts. The red dots show the
genuine coincidence counts. The red line is a fitting curve proportional to the
square of the input power.
hi a = 5.49 mW-2 , hi bi = 664 mW-1 and ci = 618 cps from
the fitting results. The black dashed lines shows the linear
components calculated from the fitting results. As Fig. 3 shows,
SFWM and Raman make almost equal contributions to the
single counts at an input power of 100 mW. The difference in
the single counts for signal and idler photons is due to
differences in propagation loss, detection efficiency of the
detectors and the number of photons generated by Raman
scattering.
Next, we measured the number of coincidence events,
changing the power of the CW pump laser from 10 mW to
100 mW (Fig. 4). Note that the largest pump power in this
experiment is technically limited to 100 mW because of the
possible damage to the epoxy resin used to connect the fibers
and the device. The accumulation time was 30 s. The coin-
cidence window was set to 2 ns. The black squares indicate the
measured coincidence events including the accidental coin-
cidence events. Then we estimated the accidental events from
the measured single counts (signal and idler) and estimated the
number of genuine coincidence events, Ncc, shown as red dots.
The red line is a fitting curve proportional to the square of the
pump power. This result shows that estimated Ncc is well fitted
by a quadratic function up to 100 mW, clearly indicating that
there is no saturation within this range of the pump power.
Finally, we estimate the photon-pair flux at the DROP port.
Ncc at the input power of 100 mW was 228 /sec. The total
efficiencies h ¢s and h ¢i are −16.1 dB and −17.3 dB, including
the transmission efficiency between the DROP port and D1
and D2 and the detection efficiency of D1 and D2. The
estimated photon-pair flux at the DROP port of 5.0 × 105
photon-pairs/sec at the input power of 100 mW is given by
the real coincidence counts divided by the total efficiencies h ¢s
and h ¢i . For a silicon ring resonator with a radius of 5 μm and
Q = 7900, the generation of 5 × 106 photon-pairs with a
pump power of 1 mW was reported.13) Taking account of the
difference of the nonlinearity7) (silicon: 300 W-1m-1,
HICDG: 0.25 W-1m-1) and the structural parameters, the
estimated generation rate of the current HICDG ring with
100 mW pump is expected to be 1.2 × 106, which is the same
order of the observed value. Assuming that photon-pairs are
also generated on 50 frequency modes, the total photon-flux
is 2.5 × 107 photon-pairs/sec for 100 mW pump power. The
typical pair generation rate of the bulk quasi-phase-matched
022006-3
K. Sugiura et al.
(QPM) device is about 108 photon-pairs/sec for the same
pump power.26) We think that the photon-pair flux compar-
able with QPM devices can be realized if the 200 mW pump
power is available by improving the endurance of the device.
To summarize, in this work, we measured the pump power
dependence of single counts and coincidence counts of the
HICDG ring resonator using CW pumping. During the
measurements the frequency of the laser was maintained at
resonance and the ambient temperature of the device was
controlled by a specially designed temperature controller.
The estimated genuine coincidence events by photon-pairs
increased quadratically as the pump power increased and no
saturation was observed up to a laser power of 100 mW. This
average power of 100 mW is over 30 times higher than that
for the reported experiment with a pulse pump.19) Note that
the 100 mW is the power limited not by the material but by
the epoxy resin, which is used to connect a pigtailed fiber. By
improving the connection, it is possible for us to increase the
input power even further. We believe the result reported in
this paper is a step towards realizing a high-flux on-chip
photon-pair source.
Acknowledgments This work was supported by JST-CREST
(JPMJCR1674), JSPS-KAKENHI (No. 26220712, H1702936) and JST PRESTO
(No. 10435951). L. Z., L. K., J. C. and P. W. were supported by NSFC(61521001,
11227904). B. E. L. acknowledges support from the Strategic Priority Research
Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDB24030300. S. T. C.
acknowledges support from the CityU APRC grant (No. 9610356).
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