Phonon-Assisted Two-Photon Interference from Remote Quantum Emitters

Abstract

Photonic quantum technologies are on the verge of finding applications in everyday life with quantum cryptography and quantum simulators on the horizon. Extensive research has been carried out to identify suitable quantum emitters and single epitaxial quantum dots have emerged as near-optimal sources of bright, on-demand, highly indistinguishable single photons and entangled photon-pairs. In order to build up quantum networks, it is essential to interface remote quantum emitters. However, this is still an outstanding challenge, as the quantum states of dissimilar “artificial atoms” have to be prepared on-demand with high fidelity and the generated photons have to be made indistinguishable in all possible degrees of freedom. Here, we overcome this major obstacle and show an unprecedented two-photon interference (visibility of 51 ± 5%) from remote strain-tunable GaAs quantum dots emitting on-demand photon-pairs. We achieve this result by exploiting for the first time the full potential of a novel phonon-assisted two-photon excitation scheme, which allows for the generation of highly indistinguishable (visibility of 71 ± 9%) entangled photon-pairs (fidelity of 90 ± 2%), enables push-button biexciton state preparation (fidelity of 80 ± 2%) and outperforms conventional resonant two-photon excitation schemes in terms of robustness against environmental decoherence. Our results mark an important milestone for the practical realization of quantum repeaters and complex multiphoton entanglement experiments involving dissimilar artificial atoms.