QiS in Physics: Photonic coupled cavity array for quantum simulation

Over the last two decades our capabilities to design and enhance light-matter interactions has dramatically increased, thanks to extraordinary advances in nanofabrication, electromagnetic simulation, and novel materials engineering. With semiconductor foundries, it is now possible to create large-scale integrated silicon/ silicon nitride photonic circuits, with independent control of all components. Additionally, going beyond self-assembled quantum dots or defect centers, which are plagued with the problem of uncontrollably random positions, we can deterministically place solution processed quantum emitters or monolayer van der Waals materials on prefabricated photonic structures. This provides a tremendous opportunity to scale solid-state photonic systems using commercial foundries and integrating emerging low-dimensional materials on them. Through wavelength-scale structuring, we can confine both photons and electrons at sub-wavelength length-scales, providing opportunities to achieve single photon nonlinear optics. In this talk, I will describe our recent effort on topological bath engineering using coupled cavity arrays. I will also talk about integration of atomically thin monolayer materials and solution processed materials on these cavities, with potential to reach strong optical nonlinearity.

Biography:
Prof. Arka Majumdar is an Associate Professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Washington (UW). He received B. Tech. from IIT-Kharagpur (2007), where he was honored with the President’s Gold Medal. He completed his MS (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley (2012-13), and then in Intel Labs (2013-14) as postdoc before joining UW. His research interests include developing a hybrid nanophotonic platform using emerging material systems for optical information science, imaging, and microscopy. Prof. Majumdar is the recipient of multiple Young Investigator Awards from the AFOSR (2015), NSF (2019), ONR (2020) and DARPA (2021), Intel early career faculty award (2015), Amazon Catalyst Award (2016), Alfred P. Sloan fellowship (2018), UW college of engineering outstanding junior faculty award (2020), iCANX Young Scientist Award (2021) and IIT-Kharagpur Young Alumni Achiever Award (2022). He is co-founder and technical advisor of Tunoptix, a startup commercializing software defined meta-optics.