On-demand indistinguishable and entangled photons using tailored cavity designs

Abstract: The biexciton-exciton emission cascade commonly used in quantum-dot systems to generate polarization entanglement yields photons with intrinsically limited indistinguishability. In the present work we focus on the generation of pairs of photons with high degrees of polarization entanglement and simultaneously high indistinguishability. We achieve this goal by selectively reducing the biexciton lifetime with an optical resonator. We demonstrate that a suitably tailored circular Bragg reflector fulfills the requirements of sufficient selective Purcell enhancement of biexciton emission paired with spectrally broad photon extraction and two-fold degenerate optical modes. Our in-depth theoretical study combines (i) the optimization of realistic photonic structures solving Maxwell's equations from which model parameters are extracted as input for (ii) microscopic simulations of quantum-dot cavity excitation dynamics with full access to photon properties. We report non-trivial dependencies on system parameters and use the predictive power of our combined theoretical approach to determine the optimal range of Purcell enhancement that maximizes indistinguishability and entanglement to near unity values, here specifically for the telecom C-band at $1550\,\mathrm{nm}$.