Introduction to our group
I am a Professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences. Our research group comprises ~12 PhD students, 2 MS students, 1 UG student, 4 postdocs, 2 scientists and 5 full-time administrative staff. I am PI/co-PI on various federally funded research projects including an ERC and a MURI (NSF, DoE, NASA, DARPA, AFOSR, ONR, NRO, ARO), and some industry funded projects (L3Harris, Cisco, Raytheon, and General Dynamics). The research agenda of all our projects are synergistically tied to the following three broad themes:
(1) Quantum enhanced (classical and quantum) communications and networking
(2) Quantum enabled imaging and sensing
(3) Fundamentals of quantum information
Our effort is primarily focused on theory. We started four experimental efforts in 2019, each of which emerged from our theory work. The student(s) performing experimental work in our group were usually the same student(s) who developed the theory:
(1) Continuous-wave squeezed-light generation at 1550 nm in a bulk nonlinear PPKTP crystal, for demonstrations of entanglement assisted sensing.
(2) Probabilistic noiseless linear amplifier (NLA) using spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) and quantum scissor, to realize quantum repeater [55,56].
(3) Multi-plane light conversion (MPLC) using phase spatial light modulators and free-space propagation segments [46] for reconfigurable pre-detection mode sorting for super-resolution imaging [45,57], with applications to astronomy and bio imaging.
(4) Novel classical and quantum probes for high-precision beam deflectometry [35], e.g., with applications to atomic force microscopy.
Our research, our collaborator-ecosystem, and student/postdoc academic backgrounds are all highly interdisciplinary, which is reflected by our publications, which appear in: APS (Physics), Optica (Optics and Photonics), Nature (Applied physics), IEEE (Core Electrical Engineering), ACM (Computer Science) and Statistics journals. I believe that high-impact advances in quantum technologies will only happen via highly interdisciplinary collaborations.
In 2014, with help of a few colleagues, I started a workshop Scalable Information Processing with Quantum Nano Photonics (SIPQNP) to bring representatives from the photonics, optical physics and quantum information communities to bear on challenging problems in quantum photonics. The 7th edition of this workshop will be held in Tucson at the Biosphere in Feb 2023.
I am the Director/PI of a Gen-4 ERC called “Center for Quantum Networks” (CQN), awarded in 2020. CQN is a $51M 10-year center aimed at developing the entire technology stack—all the way from novel artificial-atom quantum memories, microwave spin control, high-efficiency qubit-to-photon interfaces, entanglement distillation codes, quantum repeater architectures, network routing and scheduling algorithms, and quantum network tomography protocols.
If you are interested in learning more about our work, please contact us!