| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/G050392/1 |
| Title: |
Developing nanophotonics for quantum coherence and control |
| Principal Investigator: |
Tame, Professor MS |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Physics |
| Organisation: |
Imperial College London |
| Scheme: |
Postdoc Research Fellowship |
| Starts: |
01 January 2010 |
Ends: |
31 December 2012 |
Value (£): |
241,551
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Optical Phenomena |
Quantum Optics & Information |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
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| Panel History: |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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In the past decade, great progress has been made in the transfer and processing of information using light, with the size of basic components becoming progressively smaller and smaller. This advancement has been driven by a strong desire to reduce energy requirements, increase speed and flexibility, and enhance overall performance in commercial and industrial applications. Current research is now firmly based at the nanoscale, where the newly emerging field of nanophotonics promises high bandwidth, high speed and ultra-small optoelectronic components. While research into the miniaturisation of optical components has experienced substantial development, in recent years the capability of controlling and manipulating simple quantum systems in a wide-range of experimental setups has also been achieved. Controlled devices which are able to exploit quantum mechanical effects will have a big impact on the communications, computing and sensing industries in the context of quantum information processing (QIP). Here, applications such as quantum cryptography, quantum computing and quantum metrology offer far superior performance compared to their non-quantum counterparts for a multitude of tasks.The central aim of my research programme is to investigate the possibilities for a new generation of quantum-controlled devices based on the potential offered by nanophotonics. On-chip nanofabricated systems hold the promise of scalability for QIP applications due to the possibility of high-density integration of components and massive parallelisation. In order to harness this potential of nanophotonics for realising efficient quantum-controlled devices, many issues must first be addressed, both at a theoretical and experimental level. One major problem is the very weak interaction of two single light quanta. If strong nonlinear interactions are made possible at the single-photon level, it will open up the possibility for highly efficient coherent optical processing of quantum information. While various schemes have been proposed to achieve the appropriate rates of nonlinearity, practical issues make them extremely hard to realise experimentally and no clear optimal strategy is known at present. I plan to investigate the possibility of achieving large nonlinearities at the quantum level with on-chip photonic nanostructures. To do this, I will exploit the recently discovered deep sub-wavelength field confinement of surface plasmon polaritons. I intend to develop schemes to generate nonlinear quantum effects and fully characterise their performance using quantum optics tools. Up to now, there have been no studies performed in this new and exciting research direction. The main goal is to identify efficient plasmonic nonlinear optical effects at the quantum level for deployment in applications of quantum coherence and control. There are also other major problems faced in the quest for realising quantum-controlled devices in nanophotonic on-chip systems; the loss of quantum coherence, non-ideal generation and detection, and addressability issues. These problems imply that in the near-future, only small sized on-chip systems with strong quantum features and perhaps larger ones characterised by only weak quantum features will be efficiently generated and controlled in any given experimental setup. I aim to take full advantage of the potential of newly discovered measurement-based techniques for QIP to address these fundamental problems. So far, very little work has been performed in combining the two promising areas of measurement-based QIP and nanophotonic on-chip technology. I will investigate this important combination in order to create a realistic route toward the manufacture of full-scale coherent on-chip QIP. I will collaborate with both theorists and experimentalists in order to achieve the major objectives of this research programme.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.imperial.ac.uk |