Independent high-purity photons created in domain-engineered crystals

Advanced photonic quantum technology relies on multi-photon interference which requires bright sources of high-purity single photons. Here, we implement a novel domain-engineering technique for tailoring the nonlinearity of a parametric down-conversion crystal. We create pairs of independently-heralded telecom-wavelength photons and achieve high heralding, brightness and spectral purities without filtering.