An on-demand single-photon source is a key requirement for scaling manyoptical quantum technologies. A promising approach to realize an on-demandsingle-photon source is to multiplex an array of heralded single-photon sourcesusing an active optical switching network. However, the performance ofmultiplexed sources is degraded by photon loss in the optical components andthe non-unit detection efficiency of the heralding detectors. We provide atheoretical description of a general multiplexed single-photon source withlossy components and derive expressions for the output probabilities ofsingle-photon emission and multi-photon contamination. We apply theseexpressions to three specific multiplexing source architectures and considertheir tradeoffs in design and performance. To assess the effect of lossycomponents on near- and long-term experimental goals, we simulate themultiplexed sources when used for many-photon state generation under variousamounts of component loss. We find that with a multiplexed source composed ofswitches with ~0.2-0.4 dB loss and high efficiency number-resolving detectors,a single-photon source capable of efficiently producing 20-40 photon stateswith low multi-photon contamination is possible, offering the possibility ofunlocking new classes of experiments and technologies.
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