Fiber-Coupled Cavity-QED Source of Identical Single Photons

An ordered stream of single photons is fundamentally different from conventional light, which features bunches of random numbers of photons. Single-photon sources are essential for emerging technologies in $e.g.$ quantum cryptography and computing, but widespread use of bright quantum-dot sources has been thwarted by the need for complex optical setups. Thus the authors present a $f{{0}{0ex}}i{{0}{0ex}}b{{0}{0ex}}e{{0}{0ex}}r-i{{0}{0ex}}n{{0}{0ex}}t{{0}{0ex}}e{{0}{0ex}}g{{0}{0ex}}r{{0}{0ex}}a{{0}{0ex}}t{{0}{0ex}}e{{0}{0ex}}d$ source of high-quality single photons. This marriage with conventional optical-fiber technology will not only promote broad use in quantum photonics, but also may enable fundamental studies in fields from microscopy to quantum metrology, by significantly simplifying experiments.