Recent advances in nanowire quantum dot (NWQD) single-photon emitters

Future development of quantum technologies is dependent upon physical implementation of quantum systems. Photonic platforms have gained significant attention owing to the appealing properties that they offer, namely small probabilities of decoherence emergence, as well as being readily manipulable. In this regard, single-photon emitters play an integral role, and advancements in the design of single-photon sources, providing an anti-bunching photon correlation, have transitioned from its formerly proof-of-concept status to engineering attempts, and this has realized thanks to the ever-increasing improvements in the development of promising material platforms. In the race toward the realization of on-demand single-photon sources, solid-state host systems and in particular the quantum dot (QD)-based schemes, have very-well taken advantage of the recent headways in the bottom-up nanofabrication procedures. In this contribution, a review is presented on the recent progress and the existing challenges in fabrication of single-photon emitters, based on QD-containing nanowires (NWs) and their principles of operation. More specifically, we will consider how variation in values of different parameters, such as the purity, height and diameter of the NW waveguides, the electric-dipole orientation of the embedded QD, as well as different waveguide geometries, fabrication techniques and conditions exploited in their manufacturing, will affect the desired outputs in the system, i.e., the narrow photoluminescence spectrum, ideal single-photon emission of sufficient lifetime, and also the Gaussian profile in the far-field distribution. Additional focus is also given to different areas that the NWQD single-photon emitters have found application for quantum information processing purposes.