Seminars

Applied Physics Seminar: Hybrid Quantum Integrated Photonics

Abstract:

Photons and quantum optical technology have been the main testing grounds for fundamental ideas of quantum science, though implementing quantum optics experiments beyond the single photon level brings about large increases in required resources. Recent development in photonic integrated quantum circuits has radically impacted the way we process quantum information and perform complex experiments. With the advancements of such circuits, we can potentially harness the full potential and unique properties of quantum systems. Monolithic approaches dominate the developed photonic platforms for quantum optical information processing. Despite their high technological advancement, such as silicon quantum photonics, due to decades of industrial development, they come with challenges, either inherent to the way the single photons are generated, or limitations in scaling up the process.

Hybrid quantum photonic integration is an emerging field, where different photonic materials are combined to potentially take advantage of the individual constituent materials, and eliminate their drawbacks. We introduce our approach for realizing hybrid quantum photonic circuits, combining III-V quantum sources, silicon nitride photonics, piezo-electric crystals, and superconducting materials. We developed a pick and place technique to deterministically integrate on-demand nanowire single photon sources with silicon nitride waveguides. We also show that we are able to configure the photonic circuit and control the emission properties of the quantum sources using strain-tuning. Moreover, we build a full quantum transceiver consisting of a nanowire quantum dot source, a single stage ring resonator filter, and a waveguide-coupled superconducting single photon detector, all on a single chip. We also present our recent results toward room temperature quantum integrated photonics, through integration of hexagonal boron nitride quantum emitters in silicon nitride waveguides. Finally, for large-scale on-chip multi-pixel integration of single photon detector arrays, addressing individual pixels becomes challenging. We realize temporal multiplexing of single photon detectors through dispersion engineering of the superconducting transmission line