PhoG - Sub-Poissonian Photon Gun by Coherent Diffusive Photonics

We want to create a family of novel, “cheap” and reliable, quantum sources with user-selected properties, PhoGs, that will enhance the performance of many protocols across the Quantum Technologies arena. To show the capabilities of such sources in quantum-enhanced metrology, we aim to demonstrate the entanglement-enhanced imaging and the improvement in frequency stability of the atomic clock using the PhoGs. We will work with laser-inscribed integrated waveguide networks as hardware, which is an excellent platform both for such real-world quantum sources and for simulating the complex quantum dynamics, our other line of research.

Our devices will feed into the more industrial-oriented pillars, enhancing the quality of implementations. To educators, researchers and engineers, we bring a very interesting novel physics behind the PhoG devices. We exploit engineered loss, turning a traditional enemy into an ally. Letting the individual waveguides in a network talk to each other via tailored loss mechanisms allows us to design the quantum properties of output light in a very fancy way, still keeping it in well-defined high-quality modes meeting the market requirements. This is also a basis for new types of optical equalisers (smoothing signal fluctuations) and optical distributors, which are important in future multi-channel telecommunication networks.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No820365.