On-Chip Generation of Co-Polarized and Spectrally Separable Photon Pairs

On-chip generation of high-purity single photons is essential for scalable photonic quantum technologies. Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) is widely used to generate photon pairs for heralded single-photon sources, but intrinsic spectral correlations of the pairs often limit the purity and interference visibility of the heralded photons. Existing approaches to suppress these correlations rely on narrowband spectral filtering, which introduces loss, or exploiting different polarizations, which complicates on-chip integration. Here, we demonstrate a new strategy for generating spectrally separable photon pairs in thin-film lithium niobate nanophotonic circuits by harnessing higher-order spatial modes, with all interacting fields residing in the same polarization. Spectral separability is achieved by engineering group-velocity matching using higher-order transverse-electric modes, combined with a Gaussian-apodized poling profile to further suppress residual correlations inherent to standard periodic poling. Subsequent on-chip mode conversion with efficiency exceeding 95% maps the higher-order mode to the fundamental mode and routes the photons into distinct output channels. The resulting heralded photons exhibit spectral purities exceeding 94% inferred from joint-spectral intensity and 89% from unheralded g⁽²⁾ measurement. This approach enables flexible spectral and temporal engineering of on-chip quantum light sources for quantum computing and quantum networking.