Ultrafast and Quantum Photonics

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In order to derive ever faster and more precise photonic technologies of tomorrow we must first understand how light and matter interact at the most fundamental level. Quantum physics offers us the most precise description of this, however the current tools of quantum optics are not applicable to these shortest time intervals, namely time-domain description of light-matter interaction at the quantum level is largely lacking and so does the technology. How short is too short? For most photonic devices operating around the visible-near-IR spectrum, the natural timescale of interactions is of few femtoseconds [1 fs = 10^(-15) seconds], set primarily by the duration of the single oscillation of the light wave and the inertia of free electrons in matter. Our Ultrafast and Quantum Photonics team (femtoQ) studies these regimes by exploiting quantum-enhanced laser technologies and novel quantum metrology tools we develop in-house. We explore the foundational aspects of quantum science on short time intervals, develop high-precision pulsed laser technology and use it to study short pulses of quantum light, deriving nonclassical technologies for quantum-enhanced sensing and quantum metrology.