Integrated Optical Circuits for Quantum Communications

这项提议的目标是在渥太华大学的半导体集成光学芯片上实现量子和非线性光学器件的实验演示。电子工业的小型化已经达到顶峰，出现了由数十亿个门组成的微芯片，这些门充当着当今大多数电子设备的大脑。利用这项为电子打造的技术，我们现在也可以制造用于光子的微芯片。这些被称为集成光学芯片的芯片将推动新的医疗和环境传感器以及未来电信系统的发明。尽管这些应用主要基于上个世纪的经典光学，但这项提议支持开发通过量子和非线性光学过程发挥作用的新型光子芯片的研究。这带来了全新的可能性，比如量子计算机，预计它将解决目前难以解决的问题，比如药物分子建模、量子密码术--第一种被证明牢不可破的安全通信方法，以及量子计量学--达到量子物理学设定的最终灵敏度极限的传感器。我们将在芯片上使用非线性光学过程来产生用于这些未来设备的单光子和量子纠缠光子。

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.