Abstract: Photonics offers a promising approach to study quantum physics and realize quantum technology. Integrated photonic devices can pack many optical components into a small form-factor, enabling complex optical circuits that process light on-a-chip. But photons lack nonlinear interactions required to engineer entanglement and apply quantum gates. In this talk, I will describe our work toward engineering strong photonic interactions using nanophotonics. I will show how semiconductor quantum dots can mediate strong photon-photon interactions, and how we can exploit these interactions to implement fundamental quantum operations. I will then discuss how the combination of quantum photonics with synthetic dimensions could enable large scaling and deterministically tailor highly entangled multi-photon states. Finally, I will describe our experimental effort towards implementing synthetic dimensions in a real device to realize a strongly interacting random walk of photons, an important primitive for quantum simulation and quantum information processing.
About the Speaker: Dr. Edo Waks is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a member of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaborative effort between the University of Maryland and NIST, Gaithersburg, dedicated to the study of quantum coherence. Waks received his B.S. and M.S. from Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), an NSF CAREER award, and ARO Young Investigator Award for the investigation of interactions between quantum dots and nanophotonic structures. His current work focuses coherent control and manipulation semiconductor quantum dots, and their interactions with photonic crystal devices for creating strong atom-photon interactions.
Read More