SIVANANTHAN LABORATORIES, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF20A-T002

Description

We propose to design and fabricate a solid-state entangled photon source—at the all-important optical communication wavelength of 1550 nm—which has the potential for several orders of magnitude enhancement in efficiency and brightness over state-of-the-art (SOA) sources. The use of entangled photons promises many orders of magnitude enhancements in imaging, sensing, computing, metrology, and communication - all areas of importance to the US Air Force. In particular, the increased signal-to-noise ratio can be exploited to detect distant objects with increased image quality and/or observe objects with very low intensity illumination - in stealth mode - at low power consumption, ideally making it suitable for space-based applications. Our proposed work is based on the previously-observed biphoton production, but with an improved design to specifically reduce one-photon emission by orders of magnitude, which is predicted to result in enhanced biphoton emission. Our design relies on linear absorption for smaller size and power, specially designed multiple quantum wells for larger biphoton emission efficiency and longer nonradiative recombination (Auger and Shockley-Read-Hall) lifetimes, a near-perfect reflector to recycle the emitted one-photon, and the GaAs/GaAlAs system for short-wave wavelength infrared (SWIR) emission.