About us
Emergent quantum phases of light
Understanding the emergent behaviour of many-body systems is one of the outstanding problems of modern science. The interplay of interaction and kinetic energies leads to strong inter-particle correlations and a rich variety of ordered phases such as superconductivity to antiferromagnetic Mott insulators. These many-body effects are typically observed in material systems such as ultracold atomic gases or electrons in solid state. However, an exciting and rapidly growing field has developed over the last two decades motivated by a fascinating question: Can we create strongly correlated many-body systems of photons?
Scalable quantum light sources
Photons are bosonic in nature, which means they like to bunch together. However, under very special conditions, photons can be made to arrive one at a time - a phenomena known as photon anti-bunching. This happens when light interacts with certain types of quantum emitters, which include atoms or molecules, Nitrogen vancancy centers, quantum dots etc. Such single photon sources are extremely useful for some applications, such as light-based quantum computing which uses single-photon states for performing quantum operations. One of the major challenges of using photons for such applications has been the availability of scalable single photon sources. Current approaches, which rely on chemical synthesis or material growth are limited in their scalability.
Deterministic Quantum Emitters
We are working on creating quantum emitters based on 2D materials that can be deterministically defined using gate electrodes. For this, our material of choice is two-dimensional van der Waals semiconductors, in particular Transition Metal dichalcogenides. These atomically thin semiconductors host optically excited particles, known as excitons which are bound pairs of a negatively charged electron and positively charged hole. Our approach relies on creating artificial quantum dots by confining these excitons to nanoscopic scales using electric fields. Our recent works have demonstrated this concept in different geometries, including 1D quantum wires and rings and zero-dimensional quantum dots.