Integrated photonics cascaded attenuation circuit towards single-photon detector calibration

Integrated photonics platforms are a key driver for advancing scalable photonics technologies. To rigorously characterize and calibrate on-chip integrated photodetectors for ultra-sensitive applications such as quantum sensing and photonic computing, a low-power calibration source down to single-photon levels is required. To date, such sources still largely rely on off-chip bulk or fiber optic setups to accurately attenuate a laser beam referenced to a sub-mW-level primary standard. Here, we demonstrate an on-chip integrated attenuation solution where a mW-level beam is coupled to a silicon nitride photonics circuit, and is attenuated by a series of cascaded directional couplers (DCs). With an integrated silicon photodetector, we measured an attenuation at 685 nm wavelength of up to 16.61 dB with an expanded uncertainty of 0.24 dB for one DC stage. With appropriate scattering mitigation, we infer from our results that a total attenuation of 149.5 dB (expanded uncertainty of 0.5 dB) can be obtained with 9 stages of cascaded DCs, thus allowing single-photon power levels to be obtained directly on-chip from a moderate-power laser source.