Quantum Information Science and Technologies can revolutionize modern society: by enabling extremely fast computing and ultra-secure communication, to unlocking new materials, such as high-temperature superconductors, that can transform day-to-day transportation, or create new chemical processes transforming agriculture. Light is an advantageous choice for building quantum technology, as it is easy to control and detect single packets of light, also known as photons. Unfortunately, photons do not easily interact with each other, which poses a serious bottleneck for controlling one stream of photons with another. The ability to control a signal is at the heart of any computing technology. Hence, current attempts to build quantum computer using light is limited to only simple operation. Developing more complex interaction between photons can dramatically enhance the computer’s capability. This project aims to demonstrate precisely such interactions between photons mediated by electrons. The key technology has two components: a device to store light in a small volume for a long time, and an artificial atom-like medium, also known as an exciton. Such medium is already at the heart of many day-to-day technologies, including solar cells, and light emitting diodes. Integrating such atom-like medium with light-storing devices leads to strong interaction between photons. On the nanometer scale, this effect can happen at the single photon level, which is needed for quantum computing. Moreover, the large size reduction of the light-storing devices allows hundreds of them to be made on a single square-millimeter chip, allowing integrated circuits for light, akin to integrated circuits that are at the heart of today’s electronics. This project will develop a platform to help scientists better understand effects like high-temperature superconductivity. Furthermore, this project will improve the training and education of undergraduate and high school students, with a strong emphasis on including women and minority communities, in scientific research in quantum technologies. Through the PI’s active involvement with the Optical Society of America and industrial laboratories, the scientific results will be disseminated to a wider scientific audience via seminars, workshops, peer-reviewed publications, and conferences.
The research aims to develop a quantum optical platform to understand and engineer light matter interaction at the most fundamental level, where single photons start interacting with each other via single quanta of materials known as excitons. This platform is made of strongly coupled hybrid particles called exciton-polaritons, which are part-matter and part-light, and thus inherit the best of both worlds. While photons provide the ability to couple spatially separated nodes, the excitons provide the ability for the polaritons to interact with each other. The key to creating this strongly interacting exciton-polariton system is the merging of atomically thin van der Waals materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides with an extremely large exciton binding energy, and ultra-small mode-volume nanophotonic resonators and resonator arrays. Combining optical and electrical techniques as well as quantum optical modelling, the project probes coherent light matter interaction in van der Waals materials to provide deep insights into the nature of atomically thin exciton-polaritons, and polariton condensates. The ability to control polaritons provides an excellent opportunity to synthesize complex quantum Hamiltonians, which are impossible to solve using classical computers. The resulting strongly correlated two-dimensional polariton may prove critical for new capabilities in quantum nanophotonic technologies that exploit the spin-valley physics or generate new physics, such as exciton-mediated superconductivity. Combining numerical simulation, device fabrication, and optical characterization, three research aims are pursued: (1) develop a robust exciton-polariton platform; (2) realize single photon nonlinear optics for quantum many-body simulations; and (3) explore new states of quantum materials using exciton-polaritons.
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.
