Hybridized Silicon Photonics Circuits for Quantum Information Science

Silicon Q-PICs provide a miniature, stable, and scalable platform for developing future light-based quantum technologies, including sensors, secure communications, and information processors. This is due in large part to leveraging existing semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and the dense integration that the high index contrast of silicon can achieve. In order to fully implement quantum architectures, a quantum photonic system must generate, manipulate and detect single photons. While silicon has shown a lot of promise for manipulating photons and realizing quantum gates, silicon still has many hurdles to overcome in terms of the generation and detection of photons (particularly at telecommunication wavelengths).   We propose to address this shortcoming of Silicon photonics by integrating non-linear optical (NLO) waveguides with a Silicon Q-PIC.  NLO waveguides have demonstrated high brightness photon pair generation and the material dispersion in the telecom band yields high purity photons.  Waveguides in both substrates are made in a lithographically defined process which is scalable and provide tight confinement required to miniaturize quantum systems enabling implementation outside the lab.