Photon-pair and heralded single photon generation initiated by a fraction of a 10 Gbps data stream

A fraction of a classical 10 Gigabits-per-second, non-return-to-zero data stream at 1.55 micron wavelengths from a standard telecommunications optical transceiver was tapped and used to generate photon-pairs and heralded single photons using a silicon microring resonator at room temperature. These results show that there may be no need for a separate laser to generate high-quality photon pairs for quantum applications in a typical optical communications network.