Silicon nanophotonics for scalable quantum coherent feedback networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of silicon nanophotonics for scalable quantum coherent feedback networks, addressing theoretical and experimental challenges to enable integrated quantum information processing at telecommunications wavelengths.

Contribution

It extends the CQFC theoretical framework to integrated silicon photonics and reports a preliminary experiment demonstrating controllable silicon nanophotonic networks.

Findings

Identified key challenges for CQFC in silicon photonics

Extended CQFC formalism for integrated optics networks

Experimental demonstration of a controllable silicon nanophotonic network

Abstract

The emergence of coherent quantum feedback control (CQFC) as a new paradigm for precise manipulation of dynamics of complex quantum systems has led to the development of efficient theoretical modeling and simulation tools and opened avenues for new practical implementations. This work explores the applicability of the integrated silicon photonics platform for implementing scalable CQFC networks. If proven successful, on-chip implementations of these networks would provide scalable and efficient nanophotonic components for autonomous quantum information processing devices and ultra-low-power optical processing systems at telecommunications wavelengths. We analyze the strengths of the silicon photonics platform for CQFC applications and identify the key challenges to both the theoretical formalism and experimental implementations. In particular, we determine specific extensions to the theoretical CQFC framework (which was originally developed with bulk-optics implementations in mind), required to make it fully applicable to modeling of linear and nonlinear integrated optics networks. We also report the results of a preliminary experiment that studied the performance of an in situ controllable silicon nanophotonic network of two coupled cavities and analyze the properties of this device using the CQFC formalism.