Integrated Optical Circuits for Quantum Communications

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The goal of this proposal is to enable the experimental demonstration of quantum and nonlinear optical devices on semiconductor integrated optical chips at the University of Ottawa. Miniaturization in the electronics industry has culminated in microchips made up of billions of gates that act as the brains of most electronic devices today. Leveraging this technology built for electrons, we can now create microchips for photons as well. Known as integrated optical chips, these will drive the invention of new medical and environmental sensors and future telecommunications systems. Whereas these applications are mainly based on the classical optics of the last century, this proposal supports research to develop new kinds of photonic chips that function via quantum and nonlinear optical processes. This opens up entirely new possibilities such as Quantum Computers, which are predicted to solve currently intractable problems like drug molecule modeling, Quantum Cryptography, the first provably unbreakably secure method of communication, and Quantum Metrology, sensors that reach the ultimate limits of sensitivity as set by quantum physics. We will use nonlinear optical processes on chips to generate the single photons and quantum entangled photons that are used in these future devices.