Avik Dutt
University of Maryland, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Light can carry information in many separate ways at once: its color, its polarization, and the spatial patterns it forms inside a waveguide. Chips that route and process light, called photonic integrated circuits, exploit only a few of these.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
synthetic dimensions
nanophotonics
photonic integrated circuits
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Design and fabricate passive synthetic-dimension platforms from the transverse spatial modes of multimode waveguides, using mode converters to engineer desired couplings and realize topological Hamiltonians on low-loss photonic integrated circuits.
- Test whether patterned low-loss phase-change materials, which switch optical properties during a solid-solid transition, can actively reconfigure mode coupling and conversion after fabrication for ultra-compact modal control.
- Create new nanophotonic synthetic dimensions from the frequency and Floquet modes of driven microring resonators and implement them on chip in a quantum-compatible, low-loss form.
- Develop fast, efficient readout techniques to characterize nanophotonic synthetic dimensions and apply them to sensing and to analog simulation of high-dimensional Hamiltonians, including topological models for disorder-tolerant devices.
- Generate large levels of squeezed light, whose quantum noise falls below the vacuum level, over wide wavelength ranges using four-wave mixing from the third-order Kerr nonlinearity in rubidium vapor, silicon nitride and silicon carbide platforms.
- Improve squeezing in integrated chips through noise suppression, device design, dispersion engineering and multi-frequency analysis, and integrate the resulting sources closely with quantum sensors.
More about the research
A powerful trick is to treat one of these properties as an artificial spatial axis - a "synthetic dimension" - so that a single small device behaves like a large lattice of connected sites. That makes it possible to build compact chips that mimic hard-to-simulate physical systems, that are robust against fabrication imperfections, and that detect tiny signals. Work here designs, fabricates and tests such chips, and separately builds chip-scale sources of quantum light to push sensors below the noise limits of ordinary light.
Why it matters
Compact photonic chips that encode information in color or spatial mode could make communications and computing denser and more energy-efficient, and chip-scale analog simulators give a way to study materials and models that are hard to compute classically. Room-temperature squeezed-light sources that are small and manufacturable could extend quantum-enhanced measurement - today limited to specialized facilities - to practical sensing of molecular spectra and frequencies. The projects also train students for the photonics and quantum technology workforce.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Nanophotonic synthetic dimensions for scalable analog Hamiltonian simulators and sensing
NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2029
ENG-SEMICON: Integrated synthetic dimensions for reconfigurable modal control and topological nanophotonics
NSF · Feb 2025 – Jan 2028
QuSeC-TAQS: Quantum Sensing with Strongly Nonclassical Light Based on Third-Order Nonlinearities
NSF · Sep 2023 – Aug 2027
Closest labs
Alexander Khanikaev
University of Central Florida, FL·Physics
Develop a basic understanding of how light interacts with matter in quantum Floquet systems, whose properties are set by rhythmic driving in time, and identify how these interactions can be used for sensing.
Amir Safavi-Naeini
Stanford University, CA·Engineering
Design and fabricate multilayer oxide-clad thin-film lithium niobate waveguides and resonators with low loss, high nonlinearity and low sensitivity to fabrication imperfections.
Maxim Shcherbakov
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics·Early-career
Determine the fundamental properties of photonic-phononic metasurfaces that pair resonant dielectric nanostructures with phonon-polaritonic materials such as hBN and MoO3, using full-wave simulations, nanofabrication and near-field microscopy.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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