Quantum Waveguides for Indistinguishable Single-Photon Sources (QWISPS)

Covesion Ltd and The University of Southampton plan a collaborative feasibility study to investigate the use of periodically-poled lithium niobate crystals in single-photon sources for applications exploiting quantum entanglement. Laser pulses contain different numbers of photons and in our crystals these photons can be split into pairs; the laws of physics state that if one of these photons is created then the other must also exist. Based on this premise, detecting one paired photon signals the presence of the other, providing a predictable source of single photons that can be used for computation. In this project, we seek to reduce the manufacturing tolerances required to generate similar photons from different sources and our objective is to prove our new approach across multiple devices. This is an important step in enabling scalable quantum applications where many predictable photons with the same attributes are needed in parallel, such as quantum computing.