EAGER: Synchronized Quantum Oscillation between Light and Atoms on a Resonator

Laser trapping of atoms and cryogenic cooling techniques are employed in developing quantum technologies such as quantum processors, quantum communication devices and quantum sensors. When it comes to practical applications, small form factor and scalable design of hardware components is critical in large-scale integration and adoptability of the technology.

For this reason, quantum devices operating at room temperature can have transformational impact in the future of quantum technologies. At a system level, the efficient and deterministic distribution of quantum entanglement is key to developing a future quantum network. A network of this kind has applications in networked sensing for global parameter estimation, secure communication, and distributed quantum computing.

The probabilistic nature of entanglement creation in today’s available devices and platforms has limited the size of networks to three nodes, beyond which the exponential growth in entanglement time undermines the quantum advantage. The strong atom-photon interaction pursued in this program can lead to exponentially increased communication rate which together with the room-temperature operation and lack of complexity in the system, will pave the way for practical entanglement distribution between multiple nodes.

The program will train 2 capable graduate students towards PhDs with deep understanding and expertise across different disciplines, adding to the Quantum Workforce.

The quantum network project (2000) aimed to deploy quantum optical technology to establish the first quantum key distribution (QKD) network. Twenty years later, QKD is still the most practical application of quantum optics in communication. The challenges preventing the community from going beyond QKD are a) probabilistic light-atom interaction, b) lack of scalability and multiplexing quantum communication devices, and c) incompatibility and the need for heterogenous integration.

The EAGER program aims to develop a miniaturized room temperature light-atom interface that can enable scalable quantum entanglement distribution. Unlike laser-cooled atomic quantum systems and their need for precise control, alignment and challenges to miniaturization, thermal atomic vapors have already wide-spread adoption in systems such as chip-scale atomic clocks.

By guiding atoms on a chip using MEMS actuators towards photonic resonators, this project plans to realize strong and coherent interaction between photons and room temperature atoms. The coherence time on the order of photon lifetime in the cavity is sufficient to achieve deterministic entanglement. To achieve this, we increase photon lifetime by increasing the optical quality factor of microphotonic resonator and increasing atom coherence time by selectively guiding atoms near the resonator mode.

The proposed platform is efficiently fiber-coupled and will be used to study non-linear photon-atom and photon-photon interactions. This strong interaction between light and atoms, enabled by MEMS, will be utilized deterministically create photon pair generation for scalable entanglement distribution in an optical network.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.