A Single Photon Source With Linear Optics and Squeezed States

Abstract

Quantum information processing using photons has recently been stimulated by the suggestion to use linear optics, single photon sources and detectors. The recent work by Knill has also shown that errors in photon detectors leads to a high error rate threshold (around 29%). An important missing element are good single photon sources. In this paper we show how to make a single photon source using squeezed states, linear optics and conditional measurement. We use degenerate squeezed vacuum states, in contrast to the normal non-degenerate squeezed vacuum states used for single photon production. We show that we can get a photon with certainty when detectors click appropriately, the last event happening up to around 25% of the time. We also show the robustness of this method with respect to a variety of potential imperfections.