Avoiding lateral mode leakage in thin film lithium niobate waveguides for the generation of spectrally pure photons at telecom wavelengths

Abstract: Photonic integrated optical components, notably straight waveguides, serve as pivotal elements for on-chip generation and manipulation of quantum states of light. In this work, we focus on optimizing waveguides based on lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) to generate photon pairs at telecom wavelength using spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). Specifically, we investigate lateral leakage for all possible SPDC processes involving type 0, type I and type II phase matching conditions in an X-cut lithium niobate waveguide and provide a recipe to avoid leakage loss for the interacting photons. Furthermore, focusing on type II phase matching, we engineer the waveguide in the single mode regime such that it also satisfies group index matching for generating spectrally pure single photons with high purity (99.33%). We also address fabrication imperfections of the optimized design and found that the spectral purity of the generated photons is robust to fabrication errors. This work serves as a tutorial for the appropriate selection of morphological parameters to obtain lossless, single mode LNOI waveguides for building linear optical circuits and photon pair generation at telecom wavelengths using desired phase-matching conditions.