Abstract: In this talk we will discuss how to engineer the dispersion relation of photonic platforms to provide robust propagation of classical and quantum states of light.
In the first part of this talk, we will unveil how to leverage the interaction of nonlinearity with higher orders of dispersion to create novel types of solitons, wave packets that propagate unperturbed for long distances. These objects have advantageous energy-width scaling laws with respect to conventional nonlinear Schrodinger solitons and show promise for applications in ultrafast lasers and integrated frequency combs.
Subsequently, we will cover recent developments in topological quantum photonics. Topological photonics studies topological phases of light and leverages the appearance of robust topological edge states. We will emphasize our experimental demonstration of nonlinearly generated and topologically protected photon pairs and path-entangled biphoton states in silicon waveguide arrays. Further, we will detail our latest experiments demonstrating entanglement between topologically distinct modes, highlighting topology as an entanglement degree of freedom.
Bio: Andrea is the Head of the Silicon Photonics department at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA, where she develops new concepts and applications in nonlinear integrated optics and topological quantum photonics. From 2015 to 2019, she was the Professor Harry Messel Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics of the University of Sydney, Australia. From 2007 to 2015 she was a photonics researcher and a project manager with the Aerospace and Telecom departments of Tecnalia, Spain. She received her PhD in 2014 and MSc in 2007, both in Elec. Eng., from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the University of Valladolid (Spain) respectively.
She is an Optica Director at Large and the recipient of the 2018 OSA Ambassador distinction, the 2016 Geoff Opat Award of the Australian Optical Society to the top Australian Early Career Researcher, and a 2014 Ada Byron Award to the top Women in Technology in Spain.
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