Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This Strategic project targets the development of a novel, scalable source of nonclassical states of light to access high-dimensional encoding capabilities for advanced quantum information processing. The rapidly increasing demand for secure high-speed telecommunications will soon require a new technology that can provide low-power consumption, perfect security and high data-rates for handling large amounts of sensitive data. In this three-year project, we aim to explore an innovative solution to fulfill these requirements, by developing nanoplasmonic metasurfaces capable of generating photons entangled in their orbital angular momenta. These devices will grant access to extremely large alphabets for encoding and processing, thus opening the new frontier of high-speed quantum optical communications. The proposed research will enable the academic team members from the INRS-EMT and the Italian Institute of Technology (international collaborator), together with their two industrial partners, 1QBit and NewLight Photonics, to lead a concerted effort in the pursuit for this new quantum technology with unprecedented performances. Operation at the nanoscale will result in ultra-dense integration and low-power consumption, while tailorable nonlinear optical response and scalability will allow the generation of arbitrarily-complex quantum states. Such investigation is bound to be a cornerstone in the fundamental physics of plasmon-driven quantum sources and promises to lead to practical industrial applications regarding advanced quantum cryptography and computing. The involvement of industrial partners that are active in this new-forming market and the complementary expertise of the research team members represent the ideal condition towards the future commercialization of the developed technology. Finally, the new knowledge originating from this project and the associated training of HQP will surely contribute to augment Canada's competitiveness in the high-technology sector.