Photons can travel over short and long distances with extremely low loss, as exemplified by fiber-optic telecommunications. Optical photons have energy scales (~ eV) that are much greater than the thermal energy scales at room temperature (~ 25 meV). Hence, they can be coherently manipulated at room temperature without much added thermal noise. The field of integrated quantum photonics aims to leverage these properties of photons to create essential quantum resources such as superposition and entanglement. Such resources are useful for building photonic quantum networks connecting various frequency ranges; for quantum-enhanced sensing and metrology; and for building platforms to carry out analog/digital quantum simulation and quantum computing. As an example of our work in this area, we demonstrated the first nanophotonic source of squeezed light – which is a specific quantum state of light with noise in one of its components (e.g. phase) below that of vacuum fluctuations. Our collaborative work has also shown high-visibility quantum interference between single-photon quantum states, not necessarily in the usual spatially encoded basis, but using frequency or transverse modes.

Tutorials and reviews

• J. Wang, F. Sciarrino, A. Laing, and M. G. Thompson, “Integrated photonic quantum technologies,” Nat. Photonics (2019).
• U. L. Andersen, T. Gehring, C. Marquardt, and G. Leuchs, “30 years of squeezed light generation,” Phys. Scr. 91, 053001 (2016).
• G. Moody, et al., “Roadmap on Integrated Quantum Photonics,” Journal of Physics 98 (2021).
• A. I. Lvovsky, “Squeezed Light,” In Photonics, D.L. Andrews (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119009719.ch5, arXiv:1401.4118.

Original research papers from our work

• B. Bartlett, A. Dutt, and S. Fan, “Deterministic photonic quantum computation in a synthetic time dimension,” Optica 8, 1515 (2021). [Quantum computing]
• A. Roy, S. Jahani, Q. Guo, A. Dutt, S. Fan, M.-A. Miri, and A. Marandi, “Nondissipative non-Hermitian dynamics and exceptional points in coupled optical parametric oscillators,” Optica, 8, 415 (2021). [quantum nonlinear optics]
• S. Buddhiraju, A. Dutt, M. Minkov, I. A. D. Williamson, and S. Fan, “Arbitrary linear transformations for photons in the frequency synthetic dimension,” Nat Commun 12, 2401 (2021). [Quantum computing]
• C. Joshi, A. Farsi, A. Dutt, B.Y. Kim, X. Ji, Y. Zhao, A. Bishop, M. Lipson, A.L. Gaeta, “Frequency domain quantum interference with entangled photons from an integrated microresonator,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 143601 (2020). [quantum nonlinear optics]
• L. Yuan, A. Dutt, M. Qin, S. Fan, X. Chen, “Creating locally interacting Hamiltonians in the synthetic frequency dimension for photons,” Photon. Research 8, B8 (2020). [analog quantum simulation]
• A. Dutt, Q. Lin, L. Yuan, M. Minkov, M. Xiao, and S. Fan, “A single photonic cavity with two independent physical synthetic dimensions,” Science 367, 59 (2020). [Quantum Hall effects]
• A. Mohanty, M. Zhang, A. Dutt, S. Ramelow, P. Nussenzveig, M. Lipson, “Quantum Interference between Transverse Spatial Waveguide Modes”, Nat. Comm. 8, 14010 (2017).
• A. Dutt, S. Miller, K. Luke, J. Cardenas, A. L. Gaeta, P. Nussenzveig, M. Lipson, “Tunable squeezing using coupled ring resonators on a silicon nitride chip,” Opt. Lett. 41, 223 (2016). [squeezed light]
• A. Dutt, K. Luke, S. Manipatruni, A. L. Gaeta, P. Nussenzveig, M. Lipson, “On-chip Optical Squeezing,” Phys. Rev. Applied 3, 044005 (2015). [squeezed light]
• A. Dutt, T. Nath, S. Kar, R Parwani, “Splitting of degenerate states in one-dimensional quantum mechanics,” Eur. Phys. J. Plus 127, 1, (2012).
• A. Dutt, S. Kar, “Smooth double barriers in quantum mechanics,” Am. J. Phys. 78, 1352 (2010).