Harvard John A. Paulson School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences
EE SEMINAR
Friday, September 30 at 3:30pm
"Scalable semiconductor classical and quantum photonic systems"
Jelena Vuckovic, Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering
and Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Location: SEC LL2.224
Abstract: Despite the great progress in photonics over the past few decades, we are
nowhere near the level of integration and complexity in photonic systems that would be
comparable to those of electronic circuits, which prevents the use of photonics in many
applications. This lag in integration scale is largely a result of how we traditionally
design photonics: by combining building blocks from a limited library of known designs and
manually tuning a few parameters. Unfortunately, the resulting photonic circuits are very
sensitive to errors in manufacturing and to environmental instabilities, bulky, and often
inefficient. The departure from this old-fashioned approach can lead to optimal photonic
designs that are much better than state of the art on many metrics (smaller, more
efficient, more robust). Such a departure is enabled by development of inverse design
approach which efficiently searches through all possible combinations of realistic
parameters and geometries for photonics using a combination of fast electromagnetic
solvers and optimization algorithms.
The inverse design approach can also enable new functionalities for photonics, including
compact particle accelerators on chip which are 10000 times smaller than traditional
accelerators, chip-to-chip and on-chip optical interconnects with error free communication
rates exceeding terabit per second, and scaling of quantum systems (beyond present modest
scale demonstrations, such as 3 node quantum networks and two dozens of maximally
entangled qubits). In particular, platforms based on color centers in wide band gap
semiconductors such as diamond and silicon carbide would be suitable for implementing
scalable quantum systems, based on excellent spin quantum memories with direct photonic
interfaces, the possibility to perform high speed and high fidelity quantum gates on spin
qubits, combined with expertise in scaling semiconductor circuits. However, there are
outstanding challenges, including color centers integration into optical structures while
preserving their coherence and homogeneity, their spectral and spatial control, and
implementation of efficient connections between spin qubits. Novel computational
techniques such as photonics inverse design, along with new nanofabrication approaches,
play a crucial role in addressing these challenges.
Bio: Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership
in the School of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of
Applied Physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She
is also the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford,
and was the inaugural director of Q-FARM, the Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and
Engineering Initiative. Vuckovic has received many awards and honors including recently
the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2022), the Mildred Dresselhaus Lectureship from MIT
(2021), the James Gordon Memorial Speakership from the OSA (2020), the IET A. F. Harvey
Engineering Research Prize (2019), Distinguished Scholarship of the Max Planck Institute
for Quantum Optics (2019), the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Munich (2013), and Humboldt Prize (2010). She is a Fellow of the APS,
of the Optica (OSA), and of the IEEE, and an associate editor of the ACS Photonics.
Host: Marko Loncar
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Jessica Brenn | Administrative Coordinator for Academic Operations
Applied Math, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
33 Oxford Street, MD 253
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617-496-7358
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Ann Quaicoe
Harvard Quantum Initiative
Staff Assistant
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Maxwell-Dworkin 111
P: (617) 496-2361
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