Recently, researchers including Li Hao, Shu Zhiyun, and You Lixing from the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have made significant progress in the field of superconducting-silicon photonic integrated quantum photonic chips, successfully constructing a scalable quantum entanglement distribution network between cryogenic nodes. The related research findings, titled 'Multiuser entanglement distribution network across cryogenic nodes enabled by integrated photonic chips,' were published in the first-tier academic journal npj Quantum Information. With the rapid development of quantum information science, scalable quantum networks have become a key infrastructure for realizing distributed quantum computing, quantum secure communication, and quantum precision measurement. Since various types of quantum nodes, such as quantum dots, ion traps, and quantum memories, all require operation in extremely low-temperature environments, achieving interconnection between cryogenic nodes has become a major challenge in quantum network construction. To address this challenge, the research team, building on their previous success in developing an entanglement receiver chip with monolithic heterogeneous integration of pump filtering and single-photon detection functions, further realized a scalable multi-user entanglement distribution network across multiple cryogenic quantum nodes based on integrated photonic chips. This approach utilizes a photonic chip containing a 1 cm-long silicon spiral waveguide as an entanglement sender chip, placed in an extremely low-temperature environment of 2.2K, to supply broadband energy-time entangled photon pairs to other cryogenic nodes. These entangled photon pairs are multiplexed using a dense wavelength division multiplexer and distributed to multiple entanglement receiver chips. Each receiver chip monolithically and heterogeneously integrates a silicon-based passive pump filter and superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors, enabling the removal of strong pump light before detection to avoid interference with the reception of entangled photon pairs. Experimental results show that at an operating temperature of 2.2K, the filtering suppression ratio of the on-chip pump filter exceeds 56dB, and the system detection efficiencies of two sets of on-chip superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors reach 7.1% and 6.5%, respectively. To verify the feasibility of the scheme, the research team constructed a fully connected quantum network with five user nodes using ten entangled photon wavelength channels. Under this network topology, each user node can receive entangled photons from four different wavelength channels, enabling the establishment of entanglement channels between any two users. The raw visibility of Franson two-photon interference for all ten channel combinations measured in the experiment exceeded 86%, significantly violating Bell's inequality and proving the successful establishment of this quantum network architecture between cryogenic nodes. This research was supported by the Major Projects of Science and Technology Innovation 2030, the Shanghai Quantum Major Special Project, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
