Nonlinear Photon Pair Generation in a Highly Dispersive Medium

Photon pair generation in silicon photonic integrated circuits relies on four-wave mixing via the third-order nonlinearity. Due to phase matching requirements and group velocity dispersion, this method has typically required TE-polarized light. Here, we demonstrate TM-polarized photon pair production in linearly uncoupled silicon resonators with more than an order of magnitude greater dispersion than in previous work. We achieve measured rates above 2.8 kHz and a conditional self-correlation of g(2)(0)=0.044±0.004. This method enables phase matching in dispersive media and paves the way for entanglement generation in silicon photonic devices.