Review: Semiconductor Quantum Light Sources

Understand

Lasers and LEDs display a statistical distribution in the number of photons emitted in a given time interval.

• New applications exploiting the quantum properties of light require sources for which either individual photons, or pairs, are generated in a regulated stream.
• Here we review recent research on single-photon sources based on the emission of a single semiconductor quantum dot.
• In just a few years remarkable progress has been made in generating indistinguishable single-photons and entangled photon pairs using such structures.