Project Details
Description
Abstract Title: Quantum Zeno Photonics on Chip for Scalable Optics and Photonics Technologies
Nontechnical Abstract:
Advanced optics and photonics technologies deploying ultralow-intensity light beams, such as a single or few photons, promise to create revolutionary architectures for communications, computation, sensing, and many other applications. To develop such technologies, robust tools for generation and processing of photonic signals are highly desirable. Thus far, encouraging progress has been made in demonstrating the principle of their operation. However, the existing approaches suffer from fundamental challenges' such as stochasticity in photon emission and quantum-state decoherence' and technical difficulties, like a large setup volume and the need for cryogenic housing. Those issues have constituted a major road block towards commencing societally-impactful photonic technologies for which device scalability and mass productivity are a prerequisite. This project seeks to address this problem by marrying quantum Zeno blockade, which corresponds to a rather unexplored regime of operation in nonlinear optics, with a newly developed photonic circuiting technique for hydrogenated amorphous silicon of exceptional optical properties. Built upon solid experimental and theoretical grounds, this research is expected to deliver highly integrated, mass producible devices for practical photonic applications and all-optical information processing. The project will be carried out collaboratively by researchers from physics at Stevens Institute of Technology and electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Knowledge gained through this interdisciplinary project will be disseminated onto many areas of education, including through the STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools outreach program for grades 3-5, and through Stevens Technical Enrichment Program focusing on college students from low income and under-represented groups.
Technical Abstract:
This proposal introduces quantum Zeno blockade' a Zeno effect in nonlinear optics' into scalable nano-photonic systems, thereby developing a practical platform for advanced optics and photonics technologies. The Zeno effect is a counterintuitive phenomenon dictated by the measurement postulate of quantum mechanics. Its previous studies often served to illustrate the peculiar nature of quantum mechanics but had little practical relevance. Exploiting an emerging multilayer-integrated photonic circuiting technique for hydrogenated-amorphous silicon, this project will explore optically-reconfigurable, Zeno-based photonic processing on chip. Owing to the outstanding optical properties of hydrogenated-amorphous silicon, new photonic devices will be developed that have exceptionally large nonlinearity, low loss, suppressed background noise, and reduced two-photon absorption and free-carrier effects. Through quantum Zeno blockade, an 'interaction-free' quantum logical gate will be realized deterministically (e.g., without using post selection) between single photons that never physically overlap. This exotic realization eliminates the detrimental phase noise and quantum state decoherence usually present in competing photonic devices, making it particularly appealing for scalable quantum computing. The same effect can disrupt high-order dynamics during parametric photon-pair scattering, thereby generating pure single and entangled photons on demand. On chip, room temperature, and uniquely multilayer-integrated, the proposed devices are particularly promising for large-scale quantum applications built on highly-integrated photonics.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 1/09/15 → 28/02/19 |
Funding
- National Science Foundation