Special Physics Seminar

New paradigms of photonic state manipulation on synthetic platforms

Kai Wang

Stanford University

Photons, the particles of light, are ideal carriers of quantum and classical information. My research focuses on employing fundamental physics concepts and advanced photonics technology for the unconventional manipulation of photons in their intrinsic degrees of freedom, from polarization to spatial modes to frequency.

The first part of the talk will be on nanostructured metasurfaces for quantum photonics. I will show our experimental results that use metasurfaces for the interference, tomographic measurement, and nontrivial transformation of multiphoton quantum states encoded in the polarization degree of freedom.

The second part will focus on non-Hermitian topological photonics in synthetic frequency dimensions. I will show how we implement lattice Hamiltonians with unprecedented flexibility using discrete frequency modes of photons in a time-modulated system. I will show how we judiciously use losses to achieve topological invariants, from winding to braids/knots of non-Hermitian bands.

The last part of my talk will show where my works and expertises point to in the future. I will share my visions and plans on developing scalable quantum interconnect and simulators based on new paradigms of manipulation of multidimensional photonic states encoded in intrinsic degrees of freedom. This includes transformative meta-optics elements and a versatile quantum photonic simulator based on frequency/time encoding.