The quantum 2.0 revolution is well underway, with a tantalizing future just over the horizon wherein computing, networking, sensing, and even time-keeping will be unimaginably more capable than they are today. The promise of this future hinges on the ability to control, entangle, and measure both individual qubits and large systems of them. Many of the most promising physical qubit systems being developed for these purposes are atomic in nature, i.e. trapped neutral atoms, trapped ions, and artificial atoms in crystals. These atomic qubits interact almost exclusively with visible or even UV photons, requiring incredibly precise phase, frequency, and amplitude conditioning of and modulation of those photons to control them. While these systems have advanced by leaps and bounds over the last decade by focusing on small-scale implementations with a few to a few thousand qubits using “tabletop” optical controls, all of them are now bottlenecked by the inability to scale these controls to the qubit counts required for true scientific, technological, and societal utility, which will require several orders of magnitude more qubits with no degradation in performance.
In this talk, I will describe my group’s past, present, and future efforts to clear this bottleneck by hijacking the most scalable manufacturing processes known to man—those used to manufacture complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) electronic integrated circuits—to make very large-scale optical control circuits. To do this, we have developed a novel photonic integrated circuit (PIC) architecture that uses integrated piezoelectric force actuators to deform dielectric waveguides made of common CMOS insulators: silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, and aluminum oxide. I will show that this piezo-optomechanical PIC architecture provides electronic control of all the necessary degrees of freedom for photons across the entire visible spectrum and far enough into the ultraviolet to address the most important qubit species. Critically, the PIC platform has high modulation bandwidth, works from room temperature to cryogenic temperatures, handles optical power up to (at least) several watts, and has low power dissipation, self-heating, and cross-talk, paving the way towards utility scale quantum information processing with atomic qubits.