Quantum Photonics News
Leen Shonerd
The book is suitable to be used as a textbook because of its pedagogical approach to the fundamentals of quantum photonics. Quantum Photonics is supported by numerous numerical calculations that the reader can practice. Every chapter ends with a set of exercises and a reference list. This textbook is recommended for a graduate-level course on quantum photonics.
The single-photon isolator is in high demand for optical communications and optical information processing in the quantum regime, but the noise is still a limitation. Here, the author theoretically propose a noiseless single-photon isolator scheme and demonstrate experimentally using hot atoms.
Strongly driven light sources have become useful in many ways but are limited to classical emission. A quantum-optical theory now shows how non-classical states of light can be achieved from strongly-driven many-body systems, for example, non-coherent and correlated high-harmonic generation.
Dynamic and disordered media destroy the correlations that underlie many quantum measurement protocols and applications. However, coherently backscattered photons can remain partially correlated due to interference between scattering trajectories.
Under a four-year, $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Qiang Lin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, will lead a photonics system integration research project to ultimately reduce the complexity and increase the capacity of quantum information processing for secure communication, metrology, sensing, and advanced computing.
The research is expected to result in a new class of device technologies with previously inaccessible attributes and merits that may eventually have profound commercial impact on the industrial sectors. SiC combines excellent linear optical, nonlinear optical, point defect, electrical, mechanical, and thermal characteristics into a single material with mature wafer processing and device fabrication capability, thus representing a promising material system for integrated quantum photonics.
As buzz grows ever louder over the future of quantum, researchers everywhere are working overtime to discover how best to unlock the promise of super-positioned, entangled, tunneling or otherwise ready-for-primetime quantum particles, the ability of which to occur in two states at once could vastly expand power and efficiency in many applications.
Qubits, those strangely behaving drivers of quantum technologies, are, of course, different from classical bits, which can exist in only a single state of zero or one. Qubits can be both one and zero simultaneously. In the realm of photonics, Parto said, a single photon can be made both to exist (state one) and not to exist (state zero).
Researchers try to do that in a couple of ways, for instance, by putting the material on the waveguide and then looking for an existing single defect, but even if the defect is precisely aligned and in exactly the right position, the extraction efficiency will be only 20% to 30%. That is because the single defect can emit only at one specific rate, and some of the light is emitted at oblique angles, rather than directly along the path to the waveguide. The theoretical upper limit of that design is only 40%, but making a useful device for quantum-information applications requires 99.99% extraction efficiency.
The Vuckovic group investigates optics and light manipulation at the nanoscale. Harnessing developments in the semiconductor industry, we engineer platforms that both probe fundamental science and hold promise for future information technologies. Of paramount interest is studying solid-state quantum emitters, such as quantum dots and defect centers in diamond, and their interactions with light. Furthermore, we are transforming conventional nanophotonics with the concept of inverse design, where we design arbitrary optical devices from scratch using computer algorithms with little to no human input. Through these efforts we aim to enable a wide variety of technologies ranging from silicon photonics to quantum computing.
The fund will create two new programs at the University: an annual SPIE Early Career Researcher in Quantum Photonics Scholarship will be awarded to an outstanding University of Glasgow graduate student who is in the process of completing their studies. In addition, the SPIE Global Early Career Research program will support outgoing and incoming placements at and from the University as part of its ongoing collaboration with leading quantum-photonics research groups across the globe. Each year, the program will pair several University early-career researchers with counterparts from outside laboratories for six-month-long shared projects.
"We are delighted to be participating in these exciting endeavors with the University of Glasgow," said SPIE President John Greivenkamp. "The interactive placements will offer transformative opportunities for the university's academic and industry-based researchers, and, together with the annual scholarship, will develop well-prepared, knowledgeable early-career researchers who will drive the future of the quantum industry."
"We're pleased and proud to be establishing the Early Career Researcher Accelerator Fund in Quantum Photonics thanks to SPIE's generous gift, which we're very happy to match with our own funding," said Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow:. "The University's quantum photonics expertise is world-leading, and our researchers have found ways to see through walls, capture images at a trillion frames per second, and take the very first pictures of quantum entanglement in action. This additional funding will help the University train a new generation of graduate students to make valuable contributions to academia and industry and inspire them to make their own amazing research breakthroughs."
The SPIE Endowment Matching Program, established in 2019, is a $2.5 million, five-year, educational-funding initiative designed to increase international capacity in the teaching and research of optics and photonics. SPIE supports optics and photonics education and the future of the industry by contributing a match of up to $500,000 per award to college and university programs with optics and photonics degrees, or with other disciplines allied to the SPIE mission. The initial SPIE contribution to the University of Arizona named a new endowed faculty chair, the SPIE Chair in Optical Sciences. Four more agreements announced earlier this year established the SPIE-Glebov Family Optics and Photonics Graduate Scholarship Fund and the Soileau Family-SPIE Optics and Photonics Undergraduate Scholarship Fund, both at the University of Central Florida's (UCF) College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), the Baur-SPIE Endowed Chair in Optics and Photonics at JILA, and the SPIE@ICFO Chair for Diversity in Photonic Sciences.
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves more than 255,000 constituents from 183 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library. In 2019, SPIE provided more than $5.6 million in community support including scholarships and awards, outreach and advocacy programs, travel grants, public policy, and educational resources. www.spie.org.
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Their project is primarily fundamental research, but could eventually provide a pathway to applications relevant to the AIM Photonics initiative. The consortium of university and industry partners, headquartered in Rochester, seeks to advance U.S. manufacturing capabilities in integrated photonics.
Because any quantum logic gate can be compiled into a sequence of operations performed on the atom, you can, in principle, run any quantum program of any size using only one controllable atomic qubit. To run a program, the code is translated into a sequence of operations that direct the photons into the scattering unit and manipulate the atomic qubit. Because you can control the way the atom and photons interact, the same device can run many different quantum programs.
This contract further advances the photonic approach to quantum computing, a strategy that is based on the idea of leveraging existing, mature semiconductor manufacturing capabilities to accelerate the path to scale. PsiQuantum is building an error-corrected, utility-scale quantum computer, with the intention of unlocking unprecedented breakthroughs in climate, healthcare, finance, energy, agriculture, transportation, communications, and beyond.
Developmentally, however, quantum devices today are "about where the computer was in the 1950s," which it is to say, the very beginning. That's according to Kamyar Parto, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the UC Santa Barbara lab of Galan Moody, an expert in quantum photonics and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Parto is co-lead author of a paper published in the journal Nano Letters, describing a key advance: the development of a kind of on-chip "factory" for producing a steady, fast stream of single photons, essential to enabling photonic-based quantum technologies.
"Quantum technology is in a similar place -- we have the idea and a sense of what we could do with it, and there are many competing platforms, but no clear winner yet," he continued. "You have superconducting qubits, spin qubits in silicon, electrostatic spin qubits and ion-trap-based quantum computers. Microsoft is trying to do topologically protected qubits, and in the Moody Lab, we're working on quantum photonics."
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