Caltech

Integrated optoelectronic systems for wireless quantum technologies

Emerging technologies that employ quantum physics offer fundamental enhancements in information processing tasks, including sensing, communications, and computing. Various quantum technologies have been demonstrated in the lab illustrating these enhancements. Many of these technologies require specialized infrastructure, limiting their use cases in real-world environments. In this talk, we present the quantum phased array, which generalizes the operating principles of phased arrays and wavefront engineering to quantum fields, and report the first quantum phased array technology. An integrated photonic-electronic system is used to manipulate free-space quantum information to establish reconfigurable wireless quantum links in a standalone, compact form factor. Such a robust, scalable, and integrated platform with free-space connectivity can enable broad deployment of quantum technologies, expanding their use cases to real-world applications. We report the first, to our knowledge, free-space-to-chip interface for quantum links, enabled by a metamaterial antenna aperture with more than 500,000 sub-wavelength engineered nanophotonic elements and a 32-channel array of quantum coherent receivers. With our platform, we demonstrate 32-pixel imaging of squeezed light for quantum sensing, reconfigurable free-space links for quantum communications, and proof-of-concept entanglement generation for measurement-based quantum computing. This approach offers targeted, real-time, dynamically-adjustable free-space capabilities to integrated quantum systems that can enable wireless quantum technologies.