On-chip platforms for engineering photon-photon interactions and low-power photonic devices

提出的研究目的是开发芯片平台，其中光物质相互作用得到高度增强，反过来可用于设计单光子或少光子光脉冲之间的非线性相互作用。在与单个光子相关的功率下，基于光的信息处理所需的非线性光-物质相互作用在传统材料中几乎可以忽略不计，而单光子之间的相互作用可以通过所谓的“量子发射器”中产生的光学非线性来实现。根据该提案开发的平台将使用这种基于量子发射器的非线性，并通过使用半导体制造技术制造的光子纳米结构来增强它们。由此产生的系统将具有小的物理足迹，将很容易与集成电子电路接口，并将用于用于低功耗信息处理的新型光子器件，作为可扩展量子信息处理应用的构建块，以及在凝聚态或原子系统中研究量子力学现象。

The intent of the proposed research is to develop on-chip platforms in which light-matter interactions are highly enhanced, which in turn can be used to engineer nonlinear interactions between single-photon or few-photon light pulses. While nonlinear light-matter interactions needed for light-based information processing become close to negligible in conventional materials at powers associated with individual photons, interactions between single photons can be achieved through optical non-linearities arising in so-called "quantum emitters". The platforms developed under this proposal will use such quantum-emitter based nonlinearities and enhance them with photonic nanostructures fabricated using semiconductor manufacturing techniques. The resulting systems will have small physical footprint, will easily interface with integrated electronic circuits, and will be utilized toward novel photonic devices for low-power information processing, as building blocks for scalable quantum information processing applications, as well as in studies of quantum-mechanical phenomena in condensed matter or atomic systems. The proposed research will achieve its goals by pursuing the following two interrelated themes: 1) Nonlinear quantum optics with on-chip waveguides containing mesoscopic ensembles of quantum emitters: Ensembles of quantum emitters can offer significant advantages in implementing single-photon nonlinearities. These advantages include collective enhancement of light-matter interactions, robustness to noise and decoherence, and the ability to handle pulses containing multiple photons. The proposed research will explore quantum optics with ensembles of laser-cooled atoms confined inside on-chip hollow waveguides for applications such as optical transistors and memories, quantum non-demolition single-photon detectors, and ultra-stable lasers.  2) Nonlinear quantum optics with individual laser-cooled atoms coupled to arrays of planar photonic-crystal nano-cavities :  Because of the extremely small volume of photonic-crystal cavities, coupling laser-cooled atoms to these cavities can lead to a device capable of performing over a large bandwidth (~GHz) not limited by the natural linewidth (~MHz) of the atoms. Such performance will be comparable to current proof-of-principle devices based on cavities coupled to solid-state quantum emitters. However, since all the atoms are inherently identical unlike solid-state quantum emitters, such hybrid atom-cavity devices developed under this proposal can be scaled into multi-device on-chip architectures for classical information processing near fundamental power limits, as well as for quantum information processing, quantum sensing, and quantum simulations.  Four doctoral students in total will be trained in the areas of photonics and quantum technologies during the period of the proposed research.