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Charles Santori

Publications and source records attributed to Charles Santori.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

A gallium nitride single-photon source operating at 200 K.

Fundamentally secure quantum cryptography has still not seen widespread application owing to the difficulty of generating single photons on demand. Semiconductor quantum-dot structures have recently shown great promise as practical single-photon sources, and devices with integrated optical cavities and electrical-carrier injection have already been demonstrated. However, a significant obstacle for the application of commonly used III-V quantum dots to quantum-information-processing schemes is the requirement of liquid-helium cryogenic temperatures. Epitaxially grown gallium nitride quantum dots embedded in aluminium nitride have the potential for operation at much higher temperatures. Here, we report triggered single-photon emission from gallium nitride quantum dots at temperatures up to 200 K, a temperature easily reachable with thermo-electric cooling. Gallium nitride quantum dots also open a new wavelength region in the blue and near-ultraviolet portions of the spectrum for single-photon sources.

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Coherent population trapping of electron spins in a high-purity n-type GaAs semiconductor.

In high-purity n-type GaAs under a strong magnetic field, we are able to isolate a lambda system composed of two Zeeman states of neutral-donor-bound electrons and the lowest Zeeman state of bound excitons. When the two-photon detuning of this system is zero, we observe a pronounced dip in the excited-state photoluminescence, indicating the creation of the coherent population-trapped state. Our data are consistent with a steady-state three-level density-matrix model. The observation of coherent population trapping in GaAs indicates that this and similar semiconductor systems could be used for various electromagnetically induced transparency type experiments.

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Entanglement formation and violation of Bell's inequality with a semiconductor single photon source.

We report the generation of polarization-entangled photons, using a quantum dot single photon source, linear optics, and photodetectors. Two photons created independently are observed to violate Bell's inequality. The density matrix describing the polarization state of the postselected photon pairs is reconstructed and agrees well with a simple model predicting the quality of entanglement from the known parameters of the single photon source. Our scheme provides a method to create no more than one entangled photon pair per cycle after postselection, a feature useful to enhance quantum cryptography protocols based on shared entanglement.

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Efficient source of single photons: a single quantum dot in a micropost microcavity.

We have demonstrated efficient production of triggered single photons by coupling a single semiconductor quantum dot to a three-dimensionally confined optical mode in a micropost microcavity. The efficiency of emitting single photons into a single-mode traveling wave is approximately 38%, which is nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than for a quantum dot in bulk semiconductor material. At the same time, the probability of having more than one photon in a given pulse is reduced by a factor of 7 as compared to light with Poissonian photon statistics.

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Indistinguishable photons from a single-photon device.

Single-photon sources have recently been demonstrated using a variety of devices, including molecules, mesoscopic quantum wells, colour centres, trapped ions and semiconductor quantum dots. Compared with a Poisson-distributed source of the same intensity, these sources rarely emit two or more photons in the same pulse. Numerous applications for single-photon sources have been proposed in the field of quantum information, but most--including linear-optical quantum computation--also require consecutive photons to have identical wave packets. For a source based on a single quantum emitter, the emitter must therefore be excited in a rapid or deterministic way, and interact little with its surrounding environment. Here we test the indistinguishability of photons emitted by a semiconductor quantum dot in a microcavity through a Hong-Ou-Mandel-type two-photon interference experiment. We find that consecutive photons are largely indistinguishable, with a mean wave-packet overlap as large as 0.81, making this source useful in a variety of experiments in quantum optics and quantum information.

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Condensation of semiconductor microcavity exciton polaritons.

A phase transition from a classical thermal mixed state to a quantum-mechanical pure state of exciton polaritons is observed in a GaAs multiple quantum-well microcavity from the decrease of the second-order coherence function. Supporting evidence is obtained from the observation of a nonlinear threshold behavior in the pump-intensity dependence of the emission, a polariton-like dispersion relation above threshold, and a decrease of the relaxation time into the lower polariton state. The condensation of microcavity exciton polaritons is confirmed.

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