Tailoring solid-state single-photon sources with stimulated emissions

Yuming Wei; Shunfa Liu; Xueshi Li; Ying Yu; Xiangbin Su; Shulun Li; Xiangjun Shang; Hanqing Liu; Huiming Hao; Haiqiao Ni; Siyuan Yu; Zhichuan Niu; Jake Iles-Smith; Jin Liu; Xuehua Wang

doi:10.1038/s41565-022-01092-6

Tailoring solid-state single-photon sources with stimulated emissions

Nat Nanotechnol. 2022 May;17(5):470-476. doi: 10.1038/s41565-022-01092-6. Epub 2022 Apr 11.

Authors

Yuming Wei^#¹, Shunfa Liu^#¹, Xueshi Li¹, Ying Yu¹, Xiangbin Su^{2

3}, Shulun Li^{2

3}, Xiangjun Shang^{2

3}, Hanqing Liu^{2

3}, Huiming Hao^{2

3}, Haiqiao Ni^{2

3}, Siyuan Yu¹, Zhichuan Niu^{2

3}, Jake Iles-Smith^{4

5}, Jin Liu⁶, Xuehua Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Physics, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
² State Key Laboratory for Superlattice and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
⁵ Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
⁶ State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Physics, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. liujin23@mail.sysu.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 35410369
DOI: 10.1038/s41565-022-01092-6

Abstract

The coherent interaction of electromagnetic fields with solid-state two-level systems can yield deterministic quantum light sources for photonic quantum technologies. To date, the performance of semiconductor single-photon sources based on three-level systems is limited mainly due to a lack of high photon indistinguishability. Here we tailor the cavity-enhanced spontaneous emission from a ladder-type three-level system in a single epitaxial quantum dot through stimulated emission. After populating the biexciton (XX) of the quantum dot through two-photon resonant excitation, we use another laser pulse to selectively depopulate the XX state into an exciton (X) state with a predefined polarization. The stimulated XX-X emission modifies the X decay dynamics and improves the characteristics of a polarized single-photon source, such as a source brightness of 0.030(2), a single-photon purity of 0.998(1) and an indistinguishability of 0.926(4). Our method can be readily applied to existing quantum dot single-photon sources and expands the capabilities of three-level systems for advanced quantum photonic functionalities.