Incoherent photon conversion to generate infrared single photons at room temperature

At present, there exist a number of on-demand single photon sources with high emission rates and stability even at room temperature such as NV centers in diamonds. However, further improvement of infrared single photon sources is a major challenge for future implementations of quantum information and quantum communication applications. A conceptually novel method for the generation of infrared single photons was concerned which was recently presented. The presented method was applied to realize a stable, non-blinking, room temperature infrared single photon source by converting visible single photons from a defect center in diamond to the near infrared. A hollow core photonic crystal fiber selectively filled with a solution of quantum dots was used to achieve a single photon absorption probability of near unity and a very high re-collection efficiency of Stokes-shifted fluorescence. For this presented implementation, a theoretical conversion efficiency is estimated to be 26%. And a conversion efficiency of 0.1% is achieved in a first prove of principle experiment. To improve this efficiency, the conversion process was taken insights and some solutions were put forward.