Two-photon excitation with finite pulses unlocks pure dephasing-induced degradation of entangled photons emitted by quantum dots

Title data

Seidelmann, Tim ; Bracht, T. K. ; Lehner, B. U. ; Schimpf, C. ; Cosacchi, Michael ; Cygorek, M. ; Vagov, Alexei ; Rastelli, A. ; Reiter, D. E. ; Axt, Vollrath Martin:
Two-photon excitation with finite pulses unlocks pure dephasing-induced degradation of entangled photons emitted by quantum dots.
In: Physical Review B. Vol. 107 (2023) Issue 23 . - 235304.
ISSN 0163-1829
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.235304

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Abstract in another language

Semiconductor quantum dots have emerged as an especially promising platform for the generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs. However, it was demonstrated recently that the two-photon excitation scheme employed in state-of-the-art experiments limits the achievable degree of entanglement by introducing which-path information. In this work, the combined impact of two-photon excitation and longitudinal acoustic phonons on photon pairs emitted by strongly-confining quantum dots is investigated. It is found that phonons further reduce the achievable degree of entanglement even in the limit of vanishing temperature due to phonon-induced pure dephasing and phonon-assisted one-photon processes, which increase the reexcitation probability. In addition, the degree of entanglement, as measured by the concurrence, decreases with rising temperature and/or pulse duration, even if the excitonic fine-structure splitting is absent and when higher electronic states are out of reach. Furthermore, in the case of finite fine-structure splittings, phonons enlarge the discrepancy in concurrence for different laser polarizations.