  Single epitaxially-grown semiconductor quantum dots have great potential as
single photon sources for photonic quantum technologies, though in practice
devices often exhibit non-ideal behavior. Here, we demonstrate that amplitude
modulation can improve the performance of quantum-dot-based sources. Starting
with a bright source consisting of a single quantum dot in a fiber-coupled
microdisk cavity, we use synchronized amplitude modulation to temporally filter
the emitted light. We observe that the single photon purity, temporal overlap
between successive emission events, and indistinguishability can be greatly
improved with this technique. As this method can be applied to any triggered
single photon source, independent of geometry and after device fabrication, it
is a flexible approach to improve the performance of solid-state systems, which
often suffer from excess dephasing and multi-photon background emission.
