High Performance Single Photon Sources and their application to quantum technologies

Abstract

Optical quantum information processing has advanced over the last decade from a hypothetical goal and motivational reason to study single photon phenomena, to a practical and established branch of physics. Quantum information processing with photon states remains in its infancy, but is evolving rapidly towards implementable technology and real applications in the areas of metrology, communications and computer science. Of primary interest to continuing development are the sources necessary to generate single
photon states of light. Contemporary sources provide well controlled states of light using nonlinear processes to generate photon pairs in a probabilistic manner. In order to supply state of the art information processing experiments with multiple concurrently delivered photons, multiple sources must operate together. The spontaneous nature of each source causes the multi-photon delivery probability to scale unfavourably, and at present places limits on the complexity of photonic computation. The work presented in this thesis comprises two separate parts relating to multiplexed photon sources and development of an optical fibre for performing a quantum walk. Active multiplexing of four temporal emission modes of a photon pair source into
a single temporal mode is demonstrated in a fibre integrated and resource efficient implementation. An optical fibre with 37 coupled cores is fabricated for implementing a two dimensional quantum walk. The suitability of the fabricated fibre is verified with bright light and single photon interference.

Date of Award	29 May 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	William Wadsworth (Supervisor) & Peter Mosley (Supervisor)