TY - JOUR
T1 - Spontaneous photon-pair generation from a dielectric nanoantenna
AU - Marino, Giuseppe
AU - Zayats, Anatoly
AU - Solntsev, Alexander S.
AU - Xu, Lei
AU - Gili, Valerio
AU - Carletti, Luca
AU - Poddubny, Alexander N.
AU - Rahmani, Mohsen
AU - Smirnova, Daria
AU - Chen, Haitao
AU - Lemaitre, Aristide
AU - Zhang, Guoquan
AU - De Angelis, Costantino
AU - Leo, Giuseppe
AU - Sukhorukov, Andrey A.
AU - Neshev, Dragomir N.
PY - 2019/11/4
Y1 - 2019/11/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075802416&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1364/OPTICA.6.001416
DO - 10.1364/OPTICA.6.001416
M3 - Article
SN - 2334-2536
VL - 6
SP - 1416
EP - 1422
JO - Optica
JF - Optica
IS - 11
ER -