Engineering Papers⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Qi, Minghao

Publications and source records attributed to Qi, Minghao.

Exceptional coupling in photonic anisotropic metamaterials for extremely low waveguide crosstalk

Electromagnetic coupling is ubiquitous in photonic systems and transfers optical signals from one device to the other, creating crosstalk between devices. While this allows the functionality of some photonic components such as couplers, it limits the integration density of photonic chips, and many approaches have been proposed to reduce the crosstalk. However, due to the wave nature of light, complete elimination of crosstalk between closely spaced, identical waveguides is believed to be impossible and has not been observed experimentally. Here we show an exceptional coupling that can completely suppresses the crosstalk utilizing highly anisotropic photonic metamaterials. The anisotropic dielectric perturbations in the metamaterial mutually cancel the couplings from different field components, resulting in an infinitely long coupling length. We demonstrate the extreme suppression of crosstalk via exceptional coupling on a silicon-on-insulator platform, which is compatible with a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process. The idea of exceptional coupling with anisotropic metamaterials can be applied to many other electromagnetic devices, and it could drastically increase the integration density of photonic chips.

Mia, Md Borhan (ORCID:0000000320851331)↗

Quantum Information Processing in the Frequency Domain

Quantum technologies promise to revolutionize information processing through dramatic computational speed-ups and ultimate security compared with classical counterparts. As matter-based qubit systems increase in size, however, counteracting decoherence becomes challenging and places limits on how large a stand-alone system can be. These limitations, coupled with the many quantum computing platforms under development, have led researchers to view modular architectures, connected by a quantum network, as a promising path to large-scale quantum computing. Our group reported in several studies this year, progress on multiple fronts in such systems, using photons as quantum information carriers in the frequency domain.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

High-dimensional optical quantum logic in large operational spaces

The probabilistic nature of single-photon sources and photon–photon interactions encourages encoding as much quantum information as possible in every photon for the purpose of photonic quantum information processing. Here, by encoding high-dimensional units of information (qudits) in time and frequency degrees of freedom using on-chip sources, we report deterministic two-qudit gates in a single photon with fidelities exceeding 0.90 in the computational basis. Constructing a two-qudit modulo SUM gate, we generate and measure a single-photon state with nonseparability between time and frequency qudits. We then employ this SUM operation on two frequency-bin entangled photons—each carrying two 32-dimensional qudits—to realize a four-party high-dimensional Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state, occupying a Hilbert space equivalent to that of 20 qubits. Although high-dimensional coding alone is ultimately not scalable for universal quantum computing, our design shows the potential of deterministic optical quantum operations in large encoding spaces for practical and compact quantum information processing protocols.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗