Abstract: Piezoelectricity is the intrinsic coupling between electric fields and strain in materials that lack an inversion center of symmetry. We unwittingly encounter piezoelectricity in our everyday lives when doing mundane things like lighting a grill or using an electric toothbrush, but piezoelectricity is also critical for processing information, where it underpins wireless communications, medical and industrial imaging, and more. In this seminar, I will show you how carefully engineered piezoelectric microsystems can even be used to create and control quantum information. For example, my group has developed piezoelectric-optomechanical photonic integrated circuits that can be used to take in a high-power laser, divide it into many channels, and precisely modulate each channel to control an array of atomic or ionic qubits in a quantum computer. We are also using these same piezo-optomechanical photonic circuits to develop quantum computing and quantum networking architectures by using photons to create entangled quantum states of spins in thin, heterogeneously integrated films of diamond containing artificial atoms (so-called color centers). Finally, in another piezoelectric microsystem we have developed, we are developing novel surface acoustic wave phonon lasers and ways of using those phonon lasers, together with large phononic nonlinearity, to create and manipulate exotic quantum states of phonons, which could one day be used to enhance or maybe even replace superconducting circuit quantum processors. Please join me for this seminar, in which I will describe these piezoelectric microsystems my group has developed and show you the myriad ways in which we can use them to process quantum information (and some classical information, too).
Bio: Matt Eichenfield is an Associate Professor and the SPIE Endowed Chair in the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, as well as Sandia National Labs’ first Distinguished Faculty Joint Appointee. He is also the PI and Co-Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center, the Center for Quantum Networks. He received his BS in physics from UNLV in 2004 and his PhD in physics from Caltech in 2010, for which his thesis on cavity optomechanics in photonic and phononic crystals won the Demitriades Prize for best Caltech thesis in nanoscience. He became the first Kavli Nanoscience Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech in 2010 before joining Sandia National Labs as a Harry S. Truman Fellow in 2011, where he founded the Optical MEMS group, which he still leads through his joint appointment. His research at U of A and Sandia spans photonic, phononic, and electronic microsystems in diverse application spaces such as quantum computing, inertial sensing, RF signal processing, and more, focusing on scalability and manufacturability to allow these technologies to be adopted in real-world technologies and applications
