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Chip-scale simulations in a quantum-correlated synthetic space

Nature Photonics volume 17, pages 883–890 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

An efficient simulator for quantum systems is one of the original goals for the efforts to develop a quantum computer. In recent years, synthetic dimensions in photonics have emerged as a potentially powerful approach for simulation that is free from the constraint of geometric dimensionality. Here we demonstrate a quantum-correlated synthetic crystal that is based on a coherently controlled broadband quantum frequency comb produced in a chip-scale, dynamically modulated lithium niobate microresonator. The time–frequency entanglement inherent with the comb modes greatly extends the dimensionality of the synthetic space, creating a massive, nearly 400 × 400 synthetic lattice with electrically controlled tunability. With such a system, we are able to utilize the evolution of quantum correlations between entangled photons to perform a series of simulations, demonstrating quantum random walks, Bloch oscillations and multilevel Rabi oscillations in the time and frequency correlation space (demonstrated in a 5 × 5 mode subspace). The device combines the simplicity of monolithic nanophotonic architecture, high dimensionality of a quantum-correlated synthetic space and on-chip coherent control, which opens up an avenue towards chip-scale implementation of large-scale analogue quantum simulation and computation in the time–frequency domain.

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Fig. 1: Concept of a quantum-correlated synthetic crystal.
Fig. 2: Characterization of the biphoton QOFC.
Fig. 3: Quantum random walk of correlated photons in the synthetic lattice.
Fig. 4: Simulating Bloch oscillations on the biphoton temporal correlations.
Fig. 5: Strong coupling and Rabi oscillations.

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Data and information supporting the results in the article and its conclusions, and to reproduce the experiment are provided in the main article and the Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

We thank O. Pfister (University of Virginia) for useful discussions. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (grant nos. OMA-2138174 and ECCS-2231036), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency-Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (grant no. HDTRA11810047), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) QuICC programme under agreement no. FA8650-23-C-7312 and LUMOS programme under agreement no. HR001-20-2-0044. This work was performed in part at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant no. NNCI-2025233). The project or effort depicted was or is sponsored by the Department of the Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the federal government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute Of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Usman A. Javid, Raymond Lopez-Rios, Austin Graf, Jeremy Staffa & Qiang Lin

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Jingwei Ling & Qiang Lin

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Contributions

Q.L. and U.A.J. conceived the experiment. U.A.J. and J.S. conducted theoretical analysis and ran simulations for device design. U.A.J. and J.L. fabricated the device. U.A.J., R.L.-R. and A.G. set up and ran the experiment. U.A.J. conducted data analysis and wrote the manuscript with contributions from all authors. Q.L. supervised the project.

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Correspondence to Qiang Lin.

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Javid, U.A., Lopez-Rios, R., Ling, J. et al. Chip-scale simulations in a quantum-correlated synthetic space. Nat. Photon. 17, 883–890 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01236-7

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