Volkan Gurses

Building information technologies at the fundamental physical limits

PhD in Electrical Engineering & Physics, Caltech · Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT/Caltech · Visiting Researcher, NVIDIA

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Caltech [email protected] 1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125
MIT [email protected] 50 Vassar St, Bldg 36, Cambridge, MA 02139
NVIDIA [email protected] 2788 San Tomas Expy, Santa Clara, CA 95051

I am a recent PhD in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Caltech, a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT/Caltech, and a Visiting Researcher at NVIDIA. I am also the founder of Foundation, where we are building a semiconductor IP platform toward universal compute. My goal is to build information technologies that operate at the fundamental physical limits.

Research: My research focuses on studying the fundamental physical limits of technologies (e.g. the Landauer, Holevo and Heisenberg limits) and developing technologies that operate at these limits. To that end, I developed several technologies that push current devices toward these limits by leveraging concepts from fundamental physics. One example is quantum phased arrays, the first free-space sensors and transceivers for non-classical light. I built a 32-channel silicon photonic-electronic receiver that uses squeezed light to overcome the standard quantum limit and demonstrated free-space quantum imaging, beamforming and beamsteering. Another is quantum coherent transceivers. I demonstrated a squeezed-light link that exceeds the one-quadrature Shannon capacity with a 32-channel coherent receiver array, proposed an architecture to approach the Holevo limit and put together a roadmap to couple these transceivers with efficient processors to push computing toward the Landauer limit. For an overview of these projects, see my research page.

Previously: I received my Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics and Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, and Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech. I was an awardee of the Caltech Entrepreneurship Prize (first place, with Foundation), Broadcom Innovation Fund, Carver Mead New Adventures Fund, R. David Middlebrook Fellowship, Tau Beta Pi Fellowship, IEEE MTT-S Undergraduate/Pre-Graduate Scholarship, European Union Contest for Young Scientists CERN Special Donated Prize and First Prize in Physics in the Turkish National Secondary School Research Contest, and was selected as a Cell Press Rising Star.

news

Sep 06, 2026 Our preprint Generation of entanglement statistics with a large-scale integrated photonic-electronic circuit is now on arXiv.
Aug 28, 2026 I gave a special seminar at Stanford, hosted by Prof. Subhasish Mitra.
Aug 28, 2026 Our paper A large-scale integrated optical phased array with digital beamforming is published in Scientific Reports.

selected publications

  1. Thesis
    Information technologies at the fundamental physical limits
    Volkan Gurses
    California Institute of Technology, Apr 2026
  2. arXiv
    Quantum coherent transceivers toward Holevo-limited communications
    Volkan Gurses, Suraj Samaga, Elianna Kondylis, and 1 more author
    Apr 2026
  3. NatComm
    QPAsetup.png
    An on-chip phased array for non-classical light
    Volkan Gurses, Samantha I. Davis, Raju Valivarthi, and 3 more authors
    Nature Communications, Jul 2025
  4. JSTQE
    TOPScross.png
    Large-scale crosstalk-corrected thermo-optic phase shifter arrays in silicon photonics
    Volkan Gurses, Reza Fatemi, Aroutin Khachaturian, and 1 more author
    IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, Nov 2022

in the media