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.
"Hardware-efficient quantum algorithm for fermionic simulation with cavity-QED systems" appeared on arXiv
A promising near-term application of a quantum computer consisting of O(100) qubits is quantum simulation of fermionic systems, which exceeds the computational power of the world’s largest classical supercomputer due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert-space size. The target systems range from large molecules in quantum chemistry such as fertilizer made with lower energy cost, to strongly correlated electronic materials such as the notoriously difficult high-Tc superconductors. This killer app happens to coincide with Feynman’s original vision of universal quantum simulator, which uses a quantum system to simulate another and hence “fight fire with fire”.
Measurement protocol of entanglement spectrum in PRX
Entanglement spectrum, the full spectrum of the reduced density matrix of a subsystem, plays a major role in characterising many-body quantum systems. In recent years, it has been widely studied in the fields of condensed matter physics, quantum information, high energy and black-hole physics. As first pointed out by Haldane and Li in the context of fractional quantum Hall effect, the entanglement spectrum can serve as fingerprint of topological order (TO), which is itself a non-local feature and a pattern of long-range entanglement.
First measurement of photonic topological invariants in 2D published in Nature Photonics
A hallmark feature of topological physics is the presence of one-way propagating chiral modes at the system boundary. The chirality of these edge modes is a consequence of the topological character of the bulk. For example, in an integer quantum Hall system, edge modes manifest as mid-gap states between two topologically distinct bulk bands. The number of these edge modes, called the winding number, is a topological invariant and is related to the bulk topological invariant, the Chern number.
KITP program on many-body physics with photons
The Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics holds program on the subject of Many-Body Physics with Light.
JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi Receives ONR Young Investigator Award
JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi was announced as a recipient of a 2015 ONR Young Investigator award. ONR's website describes the program as being designed to promote the professional development of early-career academic scientists – called investigators, or YIPs – both as researchers and instructors. For awardees, the funding supports laboratory equipment, graduate student stipends and scholarships, and other expenses critical to ongoing and planned investigational studies.
“These recipients demonstrate the type of visionary, multidisciplinary thought that helps the U.S. Navy anticipate and adapt to a dynamic battlespace,” said Dr. Larry Schuette, ONR’s director of research. “The breadth of their research and combined value of awards underscore the significance the Navy places on ingenuity, wherever it’s harbored, and support the framework for a Naval Innovation Network built on people, ideas and information.”
Our research will be supported by Sloan research fellowship in Physics
For more info: Clark school news story and CMNS news story.
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.