Scalable feedback control of single photon sources for photonic quantum technologies

Abstract

© 2019 Optical Society of America. Large-scale quantum technologies require exquisite control over many individual quantum systems. Typically, such systems are very sensitive to environmental fluctuations, and diagnosing errors via measurements causes unavoidable perturbations. In this work, we present an in situ frequency-locking technique that monitors and corrects frequency variations in single photon sources based on microring resonators. By using the same classical laser fields required for photon generation as probes to diagnose variations in the resonator frequency, our protocol applies feedback control to correct photon frequency errors in parallel to the optical quantum computation without disturbing the physical qubit. We implement our technique on a silicon photonic device and demonstrate sub 1 pm frequency stabilization in the presence of applied environmental noise, corresponding to a fractional frequency drift of <1% of a photon linewidth. Using these methods, we demonstrate feedback-controlled quantum state engineering. By distributing a single local oscillator across a single chip or network of chips, our approach enables frequency locking of many single photon sources for large-scale photonic quantum technologies.