Near 100% spectral-purity photons from reconfigurable micro-rings*

Abstract

We propose an on-chip reconfigurable micro-ring to engineer the spectral-purity of photons. The micro-ring resonator is designed to be coupled by one or two asymmetric Mach–Zehnder interferometers and the coupling coefficients hence the quality-factors of the pump and the converted photons can be dynamically changed by the interferometer’s internal phase-shifter. We calculate the joint-spectrum function and obtain the spectral-purity of photons and Schmidt number under different phases. We show that it is a dynamical method to adjust the spectral-purity and can optimize the spectral-purity of photons up to near 100%. The condition for high-spectral-purity photons is ensured by the micro-ring itself, so it overcomes the trade-off between spectral purity and brightness in the traditional post-filtering method. This scheme is robust to fabrication variations and can be successfully applied in different fabrication labs and different materials. Such high-spectral-purity photons will be beneficial for quantum information processing like Boson sampling and other quantum algorithms.