Lithium Niobate Integrated Photonic Sources and Circuits for Quantum Technology

Yen-Hung Chen^1,2,3*

¹Department of Optics and Photonics, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan
²Center for Astronautical Physics and Engineering, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan
³Quantum Technology Center, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan

* Presenter:Yen-Hung Chen, email:yhchen@dop.ncu.edu.tw

Quantum photonics has progressed rapidly and has become an enabling solution for advancing and demonstrating state-of-the-art quantum communication, information processing, computing, and sensing technologies. Various kinds of optical elements have been developed as building blocks using photonic integrated circuits (PIC) technology for different applications. For example, PIC has been widely used in the implementation of different chip-based photonic quantum building blocks like qubit sources, linear optical circuits, modulators, and even single-photon detectors intended to be integrated on a common substrate. Such a powerful integrated scheme has been applied to build photonic chips for the creation, manipulation, and test of quantum entanglement states from the generated qubits as well as in implementing a reprogrammable logic gate circuitry for quantum computing.
Lithium niobate (LN), renowned as “the silicon of photonics”, has been a popular material widely used in integrated-optical and nonlinear-optical applications. A great variety of passive and active photonic elements have been realized in the LN platform. Recently, a novel material based on high-quality single crystalline films of LN (LN on insulator; LNOI) has been developed and has soon drawn enormous attention due to its greatly promising ability to realize nanoscale PIC in this iconic optical platform.
In this presentation, we report our recent studies on several key LN PIC building blocks for developing novel quantum photonic sources and circuits, including periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) photon-pair and squeezing sources, electro-optic polarization mode converters, broadband adiabatic couplers, and polarizing beam splitters. Several interesting chip schemes built by the integration of these building blocks for quantum photonic applications will also be presented.

Keywords: Quantum photonics, Photonic integrated circuits, Quantum photonic sources, Lithium niobate photonics