Specification of photonic circuits using Quantum Hardware Description Language

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for specifying and simulating complex photonic circuits using a hardware description language, enabling structured modeling and hierarchical reduction of quantum optical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel workflow that leverages VHDL for quantum photonic circuit specification and provides algorithms for parsing and reducing hierarchical models.

Findings

Successful modeling of linear and nonlinear optical components

Demonstration of hierarchical model reduction techniques

Effective simulation of multi-component photonic circuits

Abstract

Following the simple observation that the interconnection of a set of quantum optical input-output devices can be specified using structural mode VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL), we demonstrate a computer-aided schematic capture workflow for modeling and simulating multi-component photonic circuits. We describe an algorithm for parsing circuit descriptions to derive quantum equations of motion, illustrate our approach using simple examples based on linear and cavity-nonlinear optical components, and demonstrate a computational approach to hierarchical model reduction.