Generation of broadband polarization-orthogonal photon pairs via the dispersion-engineered thin-film lithium niobate waveguide

Broadband photon pairs are highly desirable for quantum metrology,quantum sensing,and quantum communication.Such sources are usually designed through type-0 phase-matching spontaneous parametric down-conversion(SPDC)that makes the photon pairs hard to separate in the frequency-degenerate case and thus limits their applications.In this paper,we design a broadband frequency-degenerate telecom-band photon pair source via the type-II SPDC in a dispersion-engineered thin-film lithium niobate waveguide,where the polarization modes of photon pairs are orthogonal and thus are easily separated deterministically.With a 5-mm-long waveguide,our design can achieve a bandwidth of 5.56 THz(44.8 nm),which is 8.6 times larger than that of the bulk lithium niobate,and the central wavelength can be flexibly adjusted.Our design is a promising approach towards high-quality integrated photon sources and may have wide applications in photonic quantum technologies.

Realization of a source-device-independent quantum random number generator secured by nonlocal dispersion cancellation

Quantum random number generators(QRNGs)can provide genuine randomness by exploiting the intrinsic probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics,which play important roles in many applications.However,the true randomness acquisition could be subjected to attacks from untrusted devices involved or their deviations from the theoretical modeling in real-life implementation.We propose and experimentally demonstrate a source-device-independent QRNG,which enables one to access true random bits with an untrusted source device.The random bits are generated by measuring the arrival time of either photon of the time–energy entangled photon pairs produced from spontaneous parametric downconversion,where the entanglement is testified through the observation of nonlocal dispersion cancellation.In experiment,we extract a generation rate of 4 Mbps by a modified entropic uncertainty relation,which can be improved to gigabits per second by using advanced single-photon detectors.Our approach provides a promising candidate for QRNGs with no characterization or error-prone source devices in practice.