Description: The overall goal of this NASA STTR effort is to develop a compact fully integrated tunable narrowband bi-photon source operating in the Visible/IR spectral region for calibration and characterization of high-performance transition-edge sensors (TES) arrays under development at NASA Goddard as well as other research facilities throughout U.S. The key innovation in this effort is combining waveguide-based spontaneous parametric down conversion with onboard wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) for efficient generation and fiber coupling of narrowband photon pairs in the near to mid IR spectral region.

Benefits: • characterization, optimization, and calibration of photon starved detectors • foundation for quantum-repeater based satellite quantum network • quantum metrology for precision space-based navigation • space-based entanglement tests of quantum and gravitational theories • high rate quantum communication • ghost imaging • quantum telescope

• quantum key distribution • quantum networking • quantum metrology • linear optical quantum computation