Broadband room-temperature inexpensive & indistinguishable photons
The primary objective of this proposal is to build the first cheap and technically simple source of bright single photon states that have the characteristics (including state purity, repetition rate) to power photonic quantum technologies. Photonic quantum simulators have not been able to break into the regime where they outperform classical simulators because of the intrinsically probabilistic character of the photon sources, which means that in most runs of the simulator, there is no output. By means of a new type of room-temperature quantum memory and state-of-the-art heralded parametric down-conversion photon sources, we will change this: we shall make near-deterministic single photon sources.  Briefly, a quantum memory is a device that is capable of capturing and then releasing quantum states, and are a key technology for photonic quantum technologies as they enable scalability. However, quantum memories had proved difficult to build with sufficiently low added noise, which prohibited them from operating at the quantum level. Very recently we invented and demonstrated the world’s first fast, noise-free and room-temperature quantum memory, Off-Resonant-Cascaded Absorption (ORCA). ORCA is the first full quantum memory that has the bandwidth to operate with nonlinear optical quantum light sources. Armed with our new quantum memory technology we will interface it with pure and identical photons produced via parametric down-conversion to produce BRiiGHT: Broadband Room-temperature Inexpensive & IndistinGuishable pHoTons. Our BRiiGHT module will be a rack-mounted, room-temperature, robust and inexpensive source of pure and indistinguishable photons. The outcome of the program will be the development of a technological platform that can be easily scaled up to provide the multi-photon resource states required for quantum simulation, quantum communication and elementary quantum computing tasks.