Marko Lončar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will be presenting "Quantum Optical Interconnects" as part of the Quantum Research Institute's winter seminar series from 11am - noon in the Henderson Room (3rd floor) at the Michigan League. A Zoom option is also provided.

Seminar Description:
Optically active and highly coherent emitters in solids are a promising platform for a wide variety of quantum information applications, particularly quantum memory and other quantum networking tasks. Rare-earth atoms, in addition to having record long coherence times, have the added benefit that they can be hosted in a wide range of solid-state materials. We can thus target particular materials (and choose particular rare-earth species and isotopes) that enable certain application-specific functionalities. I will give an overview of this promising field and discuss several ongoing projects with rare-earth atoms in different host materials and configurations. This includes efforts to identify and grow new materials with rare-earth atoms at stoichiometric concentrations in order to reduce disorder-induced inhomogeneous broadening, as well as photonic integration of rare-earth doped samples to increase the light-atom interaction for practical quantum devices.