Sum-frequency generation and photon-pair creation in AlGaAs nano-disks

Abstract

All-dielectric and semiconductor nonlinear nanophotonics is an emerging field enabling efficient optical interactions between magnetic and electric resonances at sub-wavelength scales, thereby achieving high directionality and high figures of merit due to very low losses [1, 2]. It was shown that AlGaAs nanodisks with quadratic nonlinear susceptibility can provide second harmonic generation (SHG) with record-high efficiency of 10 -4 [3], opening to a wide range of possible applications, including nonlinear microscopy and holography. In this work, we show experimentally that the strong quadratic nonlinearity in AlGaAs nano-disks allows efficient sum-frequency generation (SFG) with nontrivial polarization dependencies. By using the established classical-quantum analogy [4], we predict that these nano-resonators can facilitate efficient generation of quantum entangled photon pairs with higher than kHz biphoton rate and strong angular correlations.