Patent — available for licensing
High-Fidelity Deterministic Entangled Photon Source
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
Quantum networks rely on entangled photon pairs to distribute information securely across long distances, but today’s most practical sources of entanglement are inherently probabilistic. Traditional spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) sources suffer from vacuum states (no photons generated) and multi-pair emissions (multiple photon pairs generated simultaneously), capping entanglement fidelity at around 50% without additional filtering. To solve this, innovators at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have developed a deterministic source using multiplexed parametric down-conversion (MPDC). This novel architecture leverages heralding and filtering mechanisms to significantly suppress vacuum and multi-pair noise, increasing the photon production rate while breaking through traditional fidelity limits. This cascaded heralded architecture is a fundamental technology for improving the viability of next-generation quantum communications . Currently at TRL 3, the underlying methodology has been mathematically validated and physically prototyped for proof-of-concept testing. By parallelizing sources and dynamically routing the heralded pairs, the technology substantially reduces the hardware burden compared to older "double-heralding" methods. This breakthrough offers a highly reliable, high-fidelity alternative to existing probabilistic photon sources, critical for overcoming asymmetric channel losses in space-based links and long-haul terrestrial networks.