title: Enhancing the heralded single-photon rate from a silicon nanowire by time and wavelength division multiplexing pump pulses.
abstract: Heralded single photons produced on a silicon chip represent an integrated photon source solution for scalable photonic quantum technologies. The key limitation of such sources is their non-deterministic nature introduced by the stochastic spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) process. Active spatial and temporal multiplexing can improve this by enhancing the single-photon rate without degrading the quantum signal-to-noise ratio. Here, taking advantage of the broad bandwidth of SFWM in a silicon nanowire, we experimentally demonstrate heralded single-photon generation from a silicon nanowire pumped by time and wavelength division multiplexed pulses. We show a 90±5% enhancement on the heralded photon rate at the cost of only 14±2% reduction to the signal-to-noise ratio, close to the performance found using only time division multiplexed pulses. As single-photon events are distributed to multiple wavelength channels, this new scheme overcomes the saturation limit of avalanche single-photon detectors and will improve the ultimate performance of such photon sources.
authors.forename: X
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Jizan
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: A S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Clark
authors.forename: D-Y
authors.initials: DY
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.forename: C J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Chae
authors.forename: B J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Eggleton
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Xiong