An on-chip coupled resonator optical waveguide single-photon buffer

Integrated quantum optical circuits are now seen as one of the most promising approaches with which to realize single photon quantum information processing. Many of the core elements for such circuits have been realized including sources, gates and detectors. However, a significant missing function necessary for photonic information processing on-chip is a buffer, where single photons are stored for a short period of time to facilitate circuit synchronization. Here we report an on-chip single photon buffer based on coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROW) consisting of 400 high-Q photonic crystal line defect nanocavities. By using the CROW, a pulsed single photon was successfully buffered for 150 ps with 50-ps tunability while maintaining its non-classical properties. Furthermore, we showed that our buffer preserves entanglement by storing and retrieving one photon from a time-bin entangled state. This is a significant step towards an all-optical integrated quantum information processor.