Reprogrammable photonic platform for quantum simulations

Photonic technologies offer promising prospects for quantum information processing and simulations. Quantum states are usually encoded in photonic degrees of freedom like polarization and spatial modes, enabling the mimicking of target evolutions via a number of devices linearly growing with their temporal extension. This constraint intrinsically makes them lossy and inadequate for extreme quantum dynamics, especially with multi-photon inputs.
Recently, a compact liquid-crystal-based platform was realized, demonstrating the observation of asymptotic regimes of discrete-time quantum walks using only three metasurfaces. These metasurfaces utilize spin-orbit effects to diffractively mimic target evolution, operating on spatial modes with quantized transverse momentum. Despite being effective, this method remains static, implementing specific dynamics at fixed times.

We propose a dynamic solution employing three spatial light modulators (SLMs) as a universal platform for quantum simulations in structured light’s momentum space. SLMs offer programmability, enabling the engineering of a multitude of unitary operators within a compact, scalable setup.
This approach allows for the design of arbitrary quantum evolutions, limited only by individual device resolution.
Both participating institutions will contribute their expertise to the platform: on the one hand in design and testing and on the other hand in experimental realization and implementation in the quantum regime.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ebrahim Karimi

Student:

Partner:

University of Naples

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Ottawa

Program: