Nano-mechanical quantum photonic circuits

ongoing

Photons are essential for transmitting quantum information and for building entangled system on a global scale. Recent developments in photonic quantum technologies provide the fundamental tools for generating and manipulating photons within a chip. Yet, performing large-scale experiments, involving many quantum bits (or qubits), remains a major challenge due to the lack of a method to incorporate and control many sources of identical photons in the same chip. With an efficient strategy to control quantum photonic circuits, single-photon sources, and multi-photon entanglement, a fully-integrated platform for quantum information processing with many qubits and logical gates, can be built. In this project, I intend to merge two flourishing fields of research, opto-mechanics and deterministic photon-emitter interfaces, in order to achieve active control of quantum circuits and to realize large-scale nano-mechanical quantum photonic circuits. Unparalleled by other methods, nano-mechanical systems enable full control over light propagation in optical circuits with exceedingly low loss and noise, which makes them fully compatible with single-photon emitters. The main highlights of NANOMEQ are to: 1. Build the world’s smallest and most efficient photonic quantum gate. 2. Control light-matter interaction to efficiently extract, in a scalable fashion, many high-fidelity photonic qubits from a deterministic single-photon source. 3. Perform on-chip frequency conversion to telecom wavelengths for long-distance communication. These achievements will be milestones in quantum photonics and, by addressing outstanding challenges in the field, will pave the way for scaling-up deterministic photon-emitter interfaces for advanced quantum-information processing and beyond.