Our group aims to theoretically AND experimentally investigate various quantum properties of light-matter interaction for applications in future optoelectronic devices, quantum information processing, and sensing. Moreover, we explore associated fundamental phenomena, such as many-body physics, that could emerge in such physical systems. Our research is at the interface of quantum optics, condensed matter physics, quantum information sciences, and more recently, machine learning.
Winter School on Topological Effects in Photonics
TOPOLIGHT 2015: The Winter School on "Topological Effects in Photonics" will take place in Fai della Paganella near Trento (Italy) on March 15th-21st, 2015. This school is the 8th edition of the Optoelectronics and Photonics Winter School series traditionally held in Trento every second year. In addition to theoretical courses on the general theoretical tools, the school will offer dedicated lectures on specific optical systems where such physics can be observed, and potentially exploited in devices.
JQI Fellows Manucharyan and Hafezi awarded prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship
Two JQI Fellows, Mohammad Hafezi and Vladimir Manucharyan, are among the four University of Maryland faculty members that have been awarded 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships. This award, granted by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, identifies 126 early-career scientists based on their potential to contribute fundamentally significant research to a wider academic community.
UMD’s 2015 Sloan Research Fellows are:
Mohammad Hafezi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Joint Quantum Institute Fellow, and member of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics
Paper appears in Physical Review Letters as Editors' Suggestion, with a ViewPoint
Our paper on Topologically Robust Transport of Photons in a Synthetic Gauge Field appears in Physical Review Letters. The paper features as Editors' Suggestion and has also been selected for a ViewPoint in Physics. This paper reports the first quantitative analysis of the robustness of topological edge states. We demonstrate that in the presence of disorder, edge states are immune against Anderson Localization.
Proposal for measuring topological invariants in photonic system in Physical Review Letters
Recently, quantum Hall Hamiltonians have been implemented in photonic systems and their corresponding topological edge states have been observed. In electronic systems, it is known that the existence of topological order leads to "quantized conductance''. However, what is not clear is that how the integer values of such topological invariants manifest themselves in an optical realization.
Topologically Robust Transport of Photons in a Synthetic Gauge Field on Arxiv
Electronic transport in low dimensions through a disordered medium leads to localization. The addition of gauge fields to disordered media leads to fundamental changes in the transport properties. For example, chiral edge states can emerge in two-dimensional systems with a perpendicular magnetic field. Here, we implement a synthetic gauge field for photons using silicon-on-insulator technology. By determining the distribution of transport properties, we confirm the localized transport in the bulk and the suppression of localization in edge states.