Toward a Room-Temperature Fully-Integrated Photonic Quantum Simulator

Quantum simulators are controllable quantum sys-tems that can be used to reproduce the states and the dynamics of other quantum systems object of study. The ease to manipulate single photons on a chip at room temperature without deco-herence issues has made integrated photonics one of the most viable technologies for processing quantum information. Many demonstrations have been reported over the past fifteen years, included the simulation of complex and many-body interactions. Combining quantum light sources, reconfigurable circuits and high-efficiency single-photon detectors together on a single chip is an extremely challenging goal, still taking a lot of scientific and technological efforts worldwide. Here, we report emergent results along this direction. On a silicon nitride photonic platform, we separately show a source of photon pairs based on a microring, high-performance wavelength filters based on Mach-Zehnder in-terferometers and silicon single-photon avalanche diodes directly coupled to the photonic waveguides. The demonstration of these fundamental building blocks represents a starting point for the realization of a photonic quantum simulator operated entirely on a single chip working at room temperature.