Room-Temperature Generation of Heralded Single Photons on Silicon Chip with Switchable Orbital Angular Momentum

In quantum optics, orbital angular momentum (OAM) is very promising to achieve high-dimensional quantum states due to the nature of infinite and discrete eigenvalues, which is quantized by the topological charge of l. Here, a heralded single-photon source with switchable OAM modes is proposed and demonstrated on silicon chip. At room temperature, the heralded single photons with 11 OAM modes (l = 2–6, −6 to −1) are successfully generated and switched through thermo-optical effect. It is believed that such an integrated quantum source with multiple OAM modes and operating at room temperature can provide a practical platform for high-dimensional quantum information processing. Moreover, this proposed architecture can also be extended to other material systems to further improve the performance of OAM quantum source.