Photonics is a branch of optics that involves the application of generation, detection, and manipulation of light in form of photons through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing. Photonics is closely related to quantum electronics, where quantum electronics deals with the theoretical part of it while photonics deal with its engineering applications. Though covering all light's technical applications over the whole spectrum, most photonic applications are in the range of visible and near-infrared light. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.
A photonic crystal is an optical nanostructure in which the refractive index changes periodically. This affects the propagation of light in the same way that the structure of natural crystals gives rise to X-ray diffraction and that the atomic lattices of semiconductors affect their conductivity of electrons. Photonic crystals occur in nature in the form of structural coloration and animal reflectors, and, as artificially produced, promise to be useful in a range of applications.
Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have been used to test many of the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement and teleportation, and are a useful resource for quantum information processing.
A blue laser emits electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400 and 500 nanometers, which the human eye sees in the visible spectrum as blue or violet.
Federico Capasso is an applied physicist and is one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University.
The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) performs basic research in optical metrology, optical communication, new optical materials, plasmonics and nanophotonics and optical applications in biology and medicine. It is part of the Max Planck Society and was founded on January 1, 2009 in Erlangen near Nuremberg. The institute is based on the Max Planck Research Group "Optics, Information and Photonics", which was founded in 2004 at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, as a precursor. The institute currently comprises four divisions.
Jörg Wrachtrup is a German physicist. He is director of the 3rd Institute of Physics and the Centre for Applied Quantum Technology at Stuttgart University. He is an appointed Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. Wrachtrup is a pioneer in solid state quantum physics. Already in his PhD thesis, he carried out the first electron spin resonance experiments on single electron spins. The work was done in close collaboration with M. Orrit at the CNRS Bordeaux. To achieve the required sensitivity and selectivity, optical excitation of single molecules was combined with spin resonance techniques. This optically detected magnetic resonance is based on spin dependent optical selection rules. An important part of the early work was coherent control. As a result the first coherent experiments on single electron spins and nuclear spins in solids were accomplished.
Vladimir (Vlad) M. Shalaev is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University.
The International Conference on Physics of Light–Matter Coupling in Nanostructures (PLMCN) is a yearly academic conference on various topics of semiconductor science and nanophotonics.
A single-photon source is a light source that emits light as single particles or photons. Single-photon sources are distinct from coherent light sources (lasers) and thermal light sources such as incandescent light bulbs. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that a state with an exact number of photons of a single frequency cannot be created. However, Fock states can be studied for a system where the electric field amplitude is distributed over a narrow bandwidth. In this context, a single-photon source gives rise to an effectively one-photon number state.
ACS Photonics is a monthly, peer-reviewed, scientific journal, first published in January 2014 by the American Chemical Society. The current editor in chief is Romain Quidant. The interdisciplinary journal publishes original research articles, letters, comments, reviews and perspectives.
Nikolay Zheludev is a British scientist specializing in nanophotonics, metamaterials, nanotechnology, electrodynamics, and nonlinear optics. Nikolay Zheludev is one of the founding members of the closely interlinked fields of metamaterials and nanophotonics that emerged at the dawn of the 21st century on the crossroads of optics and nanotechnology. Nikolay's work focus on developing new concepts in which nanoscale structuring of matter enhance and radically change its optical properties.
A quantum dot single-photon source is based on a single quantum dot placed in an optical cavity. It is an on-demand single-photon source. A laser pulse can excite a pair of carriers known as an exciton in the quantum dot. The decay of a single exciton due to spontaneous emission leads to the emission of a single photon. Due to interactions between excitons, the emission when the quantum dot contains a single exciton is energetically distinct from that when the quantum dot contains more than one exciton. Therefore, a single exciton can be deterministically created by a laser pulse and the quantum dot becomes a nonclassical light source that emits photons one by one and thus shows photon antibunching. The emission of single photons can be proven by measuring the second order intensity correlation function. The spontaneous emission rate of the emitted photons can be enhanced by integrating the quantum dot in an optical cavity. Additionally, the cavity leads to emission in a well-defined optical mode increasing the efficiency of the photon source.
Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. She served as Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from August 2021 through June 2023. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics (NQP) Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and editor-in-chief for The Optical Society's Optical Materials Express journal. Her research focuses on plasmonic metamaterials, manmade composites of metals that use surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature.
In quantum computing, quantum memory is the quantum-mechanical version of ordinary computer memory. Whereas ordinary memory stores information as binary states, quantum memory stores a quantum state for later retrieval. These states hold useful computational information known as qubits. Unlike the classical memory of everyday computers, the states stored in quantum memory can be in a quantum superposition, giving much more practical flexibility in quantum algorithms than classical information storage.
Silicon carbide color centers are point defects in the crystal lattice of silicon carbide, which are known as color centers. These color centers have multiple uses, some of which are in photonics, semiconductors, and quantum applications like metrology and quantum communication. Defects in materials have a plethora of applications, but the reason defects, or color centers in silicon carbide are significant is due to many important properties of these color centers. Silicon carbide as a material has second-order nonlinearity, as well as optical transparency and low two-photon absorption. This makes silicon carbide viable to be an alternate platform for many things, including but not limited to nanofabrication, integrated quantum photonics, and quantum systems in large-scale wafers.
Dirk Robert Englund is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his research in quantum photonics and optical computing.
Mete Atatüre is a Turkish physicist working on experimental solid-state quantum optics, in particular on the optical control of spin-photon coupling for quantum networks as well as investigation of many-body physics in atomically-thin heterostructures, with the aim of developing new materials and devices for quantum sensing applications.
Gerhard "Gerd" Leuchs is a German experimental physicist in optics. He is the Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and an adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Ottawa. From 1994-2019 he was a full professor of physics and since 2019 has been a senior professor at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU).
