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Self-healing of an Airy beam during propagation is of fundamental interest and also promises important applications. Despite many studies of Airy beams in the quantum regime, it is unclear whether an Airy beam only including a single photon can heal after passing an obstacle because the photon may be blocked. Here we experimentally observe self-healing of a heralded single-photon Airy beam. Our observation implies that an Airy wave packet is robust against obstacle caused distortion and can restore even at the single-photon level.

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in a laser pumped optical nonlinear medium can produce heralded single photons with a high purity but a very low yield. Improving the yield by increasing the pump power in SPDC inevitably reduces the purity due to excitation of multi-photon events. We propose a scheme to overcome this purity-yield trade-off by suppressing multi-photon events in a cavity-enhanced SPDC via the photon blockade effect. By introducing a strong photon-photon interaction into the intracavity medium and increasing the pump power, we can improve the available single-photon yield to larger than $90\%$, while maintaining a high purity of $99\%$, towards on-demand generation of single photons through the SPDC process. Our quasi-on-demand SPDC sources may boost single-photon-based quantum information technology.

Photon blockade via a giant self-Kerr nonlinearity in an optical resonator induced by an N-type quantum system is one of the main routines towards photon-based quantum information processing. However, such an N-type system for phonons is lacking. We propose an effective N-type quantum system for phonons, forming from a superconducting transmon qubit and a microwave resonator. In the absence of any external driving, the quantum vacuum-qubit interaction causes the surface acoustic wave (SAW) phonon blockade. Such a vacuum-induced phonon blockade paves the way to prepare single SAW phonons from a weak coherent phononic state for SAW accessible superconducting quantum computation.

Chiral quantum systems have received intensive attention in fundamental physics and applications in quantum information processing including optical isolation and photon unidirectional emission. Here, we design an on-chip emitter-resonator system with strong chiral light-matter interaction for a chiral single-photon interface. The system includes a microring resonator with a strong evanescent field and a near-unity optical chirality along both of the whole outside and inside walls, allowing a strong and chiral coupling of the Whispering-Gallery mode to a quantum emitter. By initializing a quantum dot in a specific spin ground state or shifting the transition energy with a polarization-selective optical Stark effect, we show a broadband optical isolation at the single-photon level over several GHz. Furthermore, a quantum emitter chirally coupling to the microring resonator can emit single photons unidirectionally. Our protocol paves a way to realize multifunctional chiral single-photon interface in on-chip quantum information processing and quantum networks., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures