Spontaneous photon-pair generation from a dielectric nanoantenna

Giuseppe Marino, Alexander S. Solntsev, Lei Xu, Valerio F. Gili, Luca Carletti, Alexander N. Poddubny, Mohsen Rahmani, Daria A. Smirnova, Haitao Chen, Aristide Lemaître, Guoquan Zhang, Anatoly V. Zayats, Costantino D.E. Angelis, Giuseppe Leo, Andrey A. Sukhorukov, Dragomir N. Neshev

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Optical nanoantennas have shown a great capacity for efficient extraction of photons from the near to the far field, enabling directional emission from nanoscale single-photon sources. However, their potential for the generation and extraction of multi-photon quantum states remains unexplored. Here we experimentally demonstrate the nanoscale generation of two-photon quantum states at telecommunication wavelengths based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion in an optical nanoantenna. The antenna is a crystalline AlGaAs nanocylinder, possessing Mie-type resonances at both the pump and the bi-photon wavelengths, and when excited by a pump beam it generates photon pairs with a rate of 35 Hz. Normalized to the pump energy stored by the nanoantenna, this rate corresponds to 1.4 GHz/Wm, being 1 order of magnitude higher than conventional on-chip or bulk photon-pair sources. Our experiments open the way for multiplexing several antennas for coherent generation of multi-photon quantum states with complex spatial-mode entanglement and applications in free-space quantum communications and sensing.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1416-1422
Number of pages7
JournalOptica
Volume6
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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