Generation and manipulation of quantum light with semiconductor quantum dots

Pascale Senellart
CNRS – Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Route de Nozay, 91460 Marcoussis – France

Quantum light is a key resource for the development of quantum enhanced technologies such as secure communications, quantum networks, distributed quantum computing, metrology, etc. The development of these technologies requires light sources emitting single photons in a pure quantum state as well as efficient photon-photon gates. Such sources and gates can be obtained making use of the single-photon sensitivity of an atomic transition.

We study artificial atoms in the form of semiconductor quantum dots to develop building blocks for optical quantum technologies. We use the tools of opto-electronics and nanotechnology to fabricate close to ideal atom-photon interfaces, where a single artificial atom interacts with a single mode of the optical field. We show that cavity quantum electrodynamics allows to largely isolate the artificial atoms from all sources of decoherence such as charge noise and crystal vibrations. We obtain bright solid-state sources of single photons with very high quantum purity that allow scaling-up intermediate quantum computing tasks. We have also made progresses toward the development of efficient two-photon gates, with devices performing as nonlinear switches at the single-photon level.

Some references :

High-performances quantum light sources

Somaschi et al., Nature Photonics 10, 340 (2016)
Grange et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 253602 (2017)
Senellart, Solomon and White, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 1026 (2017)

Scaling-up optical quantum computing

Loredo et al., Optica 3, 433 (2016)
Loredo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 130503 (2017)

Toward efficient photon-photon gates

Giesz et al., Nat. Comm 7, 11986 (2016)
De Santis et al, Nature Nanotechnology 12, 663 (2017)