A novel high-efficiency single-mode single photon source

Abstract

We present a novel single-mode single photon source exploiting the emission of a semiconductor quantum dot (QD) located inside a photonic wire. We first show theoretically that for optimized designs, more than 95% of the QD spontaneous emission (SE) can be injected into the fundamental guided mode of the photonic wire. A single photon collection efficiency of 17% is measured in a preliminary experiment performed on a single InAs QD located within a 250 nm diameter cylinder of GaAs. Because this photon collection strategy does not exploit the Purcell effect, it could also be efficiently applied to broadband single photon emitters such as F-centers in diamond.