High-performance guided-wave asynchronous heralded single-photon source

We report on a guided-wave asynchronous heralded single-photon source based on the creation of nondegenerate photon pairs by spontaneous parametric downconversion in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide. We show that, by use of the signal photon at 1310 nm as a trigger, a gated detection process permits announcement of the arrival of single photons at 1550 nm at the output of a single-mode optical fiber with a high probability of 0.37. At the same time the multiphoton emission probability is reduced by a factor of 10 compared with Poissonian light sources. Furthermore, the model we have developed to calculate those figures of merit is shown to be accurate. This study can therefore serve as a paradigm for the conception of new quantum communication and computation networks. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.