Note that the question posed asked for the creation of single photons, not for their destruction. Thus discussions of photon detection are irrelevant for the question asked.
There are two kinds of single photons produced in the lab: "photons on demand" (see, e.g., Section 2.13 of http://lanl.arxiv.org/pdf/0810.1019v2 ) - which are truly single, and "heralded photons" (see, e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0408093 ) - entangled photon pairs of which one partner is detected, so that it is known (after the detection time) that the other partner is now single. There are many articles discussing details; the two references given are only the tip of an iceberg. Google the terms in quotation marks to find many more references....