The past six decades have witnessed unprecedented progress in humanity's ability to compute, enabling applications that were previously unimaginable. This has been achieved with the advent of the electronic integrated circuit, where billions of electrical elements are built together on a single chip. Humanity's ability to exchange information has undergone a similar paradigm shift, due to the recent commercialization of the photonic integrated circuit, the optical analog of the electronic integrated circuit, which encodes information on light, rather than electricity. The emerging field of quantum information processing, where quantum mechanical properties of electrons and/or photons are used to encode and process information, offers the potential for more secure and energy-efficient communications and computation. Unfortunately, there is no established toolkit of materials that can perform all of the necessary quantum information processing functions on a single integrated circuit chip. The goal of this project is to demonstrate such a materials platform and to harness it to perform fundamental scientific measurements of key quantum properties of light. Research results will be integrated with education through important curricular development by offering a broadly accessible, interdisciplinary course on quantum information that is essential for workforce training.
A fundamental resource for universal linear optical quantum information processing is the ability to create and characterize Bell states on a chip that can be extended to cluster states. This is a key building block for quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum networks (nodes of the Quantum Internet). Photonic integrated circuits have revolutionized modern optical fiber communication systems, but are unable to address the needs of future quantum information systems. This award supports an ambitious effort to create a scalable photonic integrated circuit platform for quantum information processing at telecommunications wavelengths and employ it to generate and manipulate Bell states on-chip. This project will leverage the existing technology infrastructure of Indium Phosphide (InP)-based chips, the dominant platform for long-haul photonic integrated circuits.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
