Multiplexing photons with a binary division strategy

Abstract

We present a scheme to produce clock-synchronized photons from a single parametric downconversion source with a binary division strategy. The time difference between a clock and detections of the herald photons determines the amount of delay that must be imposed to a photon by actively switching different temporal segments, so that all photons emerge from the output with their wavepackets temporally synchronized with the temporal reference. The operation is performed using a binary division configuration which minimizes the passages through switches. Finally, we extend this scheme to the production of many synchronized photons and find expressions for the optimal amount of correction stages as a function of the pair generation rate and the target coherence time. Our results show that, for the generation of this heralded single-photon per output state at an optimized input photon flux, the output rate of our scheme scales essentially with the reciprocal of the target output photon number. With current technology, rates of up to 10^4 synchronized pairs per second could be observed with only 7 correction stages.