2024

• Rafael Romero Mendez has been awarded a SPIRE undergraduate research fellowship for the summer. Congrats!
• Following our pre-print from last year, the FloQuET group’s first journal paper is out in Nature Physics! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02413 
  Quantized topological pumping in Floquet synthetic dimensions with a driven dissipative photonic molecule. Authors are Sashank Kaushik Sridhar, Sayan Ghosh, Dhruv Srinivasan, Alexander Miller, and Avik Dutt.
  We report a theoretical proposal buttressed with preliminary experiments to show how high-dimensional topology can be realized with current state-of-the-art nanophotonics, overcoming several challenges typical of previous proposals. Feedback and comments are welcome.
• Avik has been awarded a Vaibhav fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. 
• Two papers from the FloQuET lab have been accepted at CLEO 2024 (Conference on Lasers & Electro-Optics). Congratulations to Frank and Dhruv who led these two papers!
• Rafael is awarded the IPST MathQuantum Undergraduate Fellowship. Congrats!
• Rohith Srikanth joins the group as a graduate student in Electrical Engineering (Spring ’24). Welcome!

2023

• Two abstracts from the FloQuET lab are accepted for the APS March Meeting 2024. Congrats to Miles and Sashank, who led these two papers!
• Alexander Miller (BS Mechanical Engineering ’24), Rafael Romero Mendez (BS Physics and Math ’25), and Kushagra Mehta (BS Physics and Computer Science ’26) join the lab. Welcome!
• Nathaniel Fried has officially advanced to PhD candidacy. Congrats!
• Dhruv’s paper on quantum circuit optimization, collaboratively with Dr. Nikhil Chopra and Kushal Chakrabarti, has been accepted for oral presentation at the IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering Conference 2023 (IEEE QCE23), Bellevue WA. Dhruv will present this work at the Quantum Applications Track in Sept. ’23.
• Camille McDonnell (graduate student, Chemical Physics) joins the group. Welcome!
• The FloQuET lab has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to address Quantum Sensing Challenges for Translational Advances in Quantum Sciences (QuSeC-TAQS). The team is led by UMD, and involves collaborators from NIST/JQI (Dr. Paul Lett), Stanford (Jelena Vuckovic) and the University of Chicago (Dr. Peter Maurer). We are grateful to NSF for their support of our research. (August ’23).
  • Read more about the 18 teams awarded grants under this program here: Quantum-scale sensors to yield human-scale benefits.
  • Read the coverage on Maryland today, Mechanical Engineering News.
• Nate and Sashank presented their research results at the CLEO conference, San Jose, CA (May ’23).
• The first results from our group are out: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02238
  Quantized topological energy pumping and Weyl points in Floquet synthetic dimensions with a driven-dissipative photonic molecule: Authors are Sashank Kaushik Sridhar and Sayan Ghosh.
• Avik has been ranked among the top 2% of scientists worldwide based on single-year citations in 2021. Read the news story here: https://enme.umd.edu/news/story/umd-me-faculty-ranked-in-top-2-of-scientists-worldwide
• Joohyung Song (graduate student, ECE) joins the group for summer 2023. Welcome!
• Sondos Quqandi (B.S. ’24 Physics & Computer Science) joins the group for summer 2023. Welcome!
• Dhruv Srinivasan was selected for a summer research internship at IBM Quantum, Yorktown Heights, NYC. Dhruv will be working on quantum hardware development. Congratulations!
• FloQuET lab members Dhruv, Sondos, Sashank and Avik participate in mentoring the Quantum track for the Bitcamp 2023 hackathon at UMD. Sleepless nights spent at the Xfinity arena on workshops and quantum hacking. Pictures coming soon, but till then, check it out here: https://bit.camp/
• Calix (The-Vinh) Tran-Luu (B.S. Computer Science ’26) joins the group as an undergraduate student (Spring ’23). Welcome!
• Two papers from the FloQuET lab have been accepted at CLEO 2023 (Conference on Lasers & Electro-Optics). Congratulations to Sashank and Nate who led these two papers!
• Samarth Sriram joins the group as an undergraduate researcher (Spring ’23). Welcome!
• Renovations of our IPST Lab are complete! Exciting times to set up experiments. Stay tuned for pictures!
• Frank (Yichen) Shen joins the group as a graduate student in (quantum) Mechanical Engineering (Spring ’23). Welcome!

2022

• Avik presents a tutorial talk on Photonic Quantum Technologies at the UQA x IBM Qiskit Fall Fest, organized by the undergraduate quantum association (UQA) at UMD (Oct ’22).
• The FloQuET lab has been awarded a seed grant from NAWCAD – Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Southern Maryland. We are grateful to NAWCAD for their support of our research. (Nov ’22).
• Elaine Sanico, Harvir Ghuman, and Emannuel George join the group as undergraduate students (Fall ’22). Welcome!
• Avik presented a talk at the Workshop on U.S.-Japan Digital Innovation and Advanced Technology hosted by UMD Civil and Environmental Engineering. Read the associated news release here: https://cee.umd.edu/news/story/a-boost-for-international-research-collaboration
• Dhruv Srinivasan (B.S. Mechanical Engineering & Physics ’25) joins our group as an undergraduate student (Fall ’22). Welcome!
• Fahad Anis Shaikh joins the group for a rotation project in Fall ’22. Fahad is a graduate student in the IPST Chemical Physics program. Welcome!
• Sashank Kaushik Sridhar joins the group as a graduate student in (quantum) Mechanical Engineering (Fall ’22). Welcome!
• Renovations are underway in our shared lab at the Kim Engineering Building (summer ’22).
• The FloQuET lab has been awarded an inaugural National Q-Lab seed grant, jointly with Prof. Nikhil Chopra. The National Q-Lab was set up jointly between IonQ Inc. and the University of Maryland to further research and collaboration between the two hubs of quantum technology. We are grateful to Q-Lab for their support of our research. (June ’22)
• Sayan Ghosh will work over summer ’22 as a remote undergraduate intern from IISER Kolkata.
• Nathaniel (Nate) Fried joins the group as a graduate student in the IPST Chemical Physics program. (summer ’22).
• The FloQuET lab has been awarded a seed grant from Northrop Grumman. We are grateful to NG for their support of our research. (April ’22)
• FloQuET group webpage launched! We will pursue Fearless research in Optics, Quantum Engineering and Technology to pursue society’s Grand Challenges, in keeping with the mission of the University of Maryland (April ’22).
• Avik’s co-first authored paper with the Marandi group at Caltech, on how versatile topological phases can be realized in time-multiplexed photonic resonator networks, using dissipative couplings exclusively, is out in Nature Physics. It was also featured in a News & Views piece, “Loss leads the way to utopia”, due to the scalability and reconfigurability of the platform (Feb ‘ 22).
• Presto Early Adopter program: Our team has been selected for the Presto Early Adopter program by the company Intermodulation Products, to assess the next generation of RF/Microwave multifrequency direct-digital synthesizers and I-Q modulator/demodulator platforms.

2021

• Avik presented his recent work on topological and non-Hermitian physics using synthetic dimensions for photons at the colloquium in the Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil on November 18, 2021. http://portal.if.usp.br/pesquisa/node/2100. A YouTube stream of the talk is now available (also see the Videos page).
• Avik presented an invited talk at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell (UML) Seminar on Theoretical Physics.