Research

Quantum meta-photonics

Flexibly manipulating the quantum states of light is vital for various quantum technology platforms. Traditional optical systems used in quantum technologies were designed for classical light and unsuited for current quantum applications as they are bulky, lossy, unstable, inflexible, and not scalable.

We leverage the transformative platform of meta-optics composed of nanostructured metasurfaces or metamaterials to enable a new paradigm for generating, manipulating, and measuring non-classical light. Such meta-optics have the most direct access to all the degrees of freedom of photons, from polarization to spatial states to frequencies, thus allowing a massively parallel approach to quantum photonics.

K. Wang, M. Chekhova, and Y. Kivshar,  Physics Today 75, 38 (2022).
K. Wang, et al., Science 361, 1104 (2018).

Photonic quantum simulator in synthetic dimensions

We also leverage photons’ various degrees of freedom to synthesize extra dimensions beyond real space to realize a class of highly powerful photonic quantum simulators.

In particular, we use such photonic systems to emulate a wide range of topological bosonic matter, primarily those described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians or dynamical matrices. We are also exploring topological phases of bosonic matter in higher-dimensional space, as well as the physics of non-Abelian gauge fields or topological invariants.

K. Wang, et al., Science 371, 1240 (2021).
K. Wang, et al., Nature 598, 59 (2021).