Generating photon pairs from a silicon microring resonator using an electronic step recovery diode for pump pulse generation

Abstract: Generation of photon pairs from compact, manufacturable and inexpensive silicon (Si) photonic devices at room temperature may help develop practical applications of quantum photonics. An important characteristic of photon-pair generation is the two-photon joint spectral intensity (JSI), which describes the frequency correlations of the photon pair. In particular, heralded single-photon generation requires uncorrelated photons, rather than the highly anti-correlated photons conventionally obtained under continuous-wave (CW) pumping. Recent attempts to achieve such a factorizable JSI have used short optical pulses from mode-locked lasers, which are much more expensive and bigger table-top or rack-sized instruments compared to the Si microchip pair generator, dominate the cost and inhibit the miniaturization of the source. Here, we generate photon pairs from a Si microring resonator by using an electronic step-recovery diode to drive an electro-optic modulator which carves the pump light from a CW optical diode into pulses of the appropriate width, thus potentially eliminating the need for optical mode-locked lasers.