Grant: Alliance Grants

The quanta of light, called photons, provide unique advantages for information processing and computing. Photons travel at the speed of light, enabling ultrafast operations in contrast to other quantum computing architectures. They can also carry quantum information over long distances as "flying qubits", needed for a future quantum internet. Despite these inherent advantages, photon-based quantum computers are much less developed than other quantum computing architectures such as atomic ion traps and superconducting circuits. The key obstacle is efficient generation of entanglement with low photon loss. Pioneering experiments circumvented this problem by using large crystals of ferroelectric materials with periodically-poled ferroelectric domains. Unfortunately, these experiments require an optical table which is not scalable to the large number of qubits required for a quantum computer with error correction. The goal of the Consortium on Integrated Quantum Photonics with Ferroelectric Materials is to translate quantum photonics from an optical table to a silicon chip by incorporating ferroelectric materials such as barium titanite (BaTiO3) and lithium niobate (LiNbO3) into silicon photonic chips. The proposal is strategic in that it brings together researchers from across industry and 6 Canadian universities with expertise in materials' growth using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), photonic chip design and fabrication, theoretical modeling, and quantum optics experimentation. The end goal is to demonstrate two key primitives for photon-based quantum computing and quantum sensing: photon squeezing above the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum error correction, and photon cluster states. Our research will develop the devices required to make photonic quantum computing commercially viable in both discrete and continuous-variable approaches. It will help position Canada as a leader in chip-based quantum photonics and positively impact the industrial sectors key to everyday Canadian life by underpinning the technologies needed for secure communications, advanced sensors and quantum computing.