Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The combination of photonics and high-speed electronics has been established as a   successful technology to generate, manipulate, transmit and detect information either in optical or electrical forms.  The increasing quest for achieving ultra-sensitive, ultra-low noise and high-speed/high-frequency devices with applications in sensing, processing and metrology is constantly pushing researchers to find novel optoelectronic devices and systems. The continuous exploration of such systems has recently led to the possibility of using superconducting materials in optoelectronic and microwave-to-THz photonic devices to take advantage of their macroscopic quantum behavior. In order for superconducting optoelectronics to attain its full potential, devices and systems must be developed and characterized. This proposal requests the purchase of two research tool infrastructures; Wedge ultrasonic wire bonder to make the raw superconducting devices to connect to the rest of photonic and electronic devices and measurement systems and a PNA network analyzer to perform high-frequency optoelectronic characterization. The integration of these two units to our previously established infrastructure laboratory, Integrated Quantum Optoelectronics Lab (IQOL), provides a full operation of our cryogenic four-probe microwave station to test our existing and future superconducting optoelectronic devices. Superconducting nano-wire single-photon optical detector, photomixers, and optoelectronic mixers and switches are paramount examples of our devices with applications ranging from fiber-optic quantum cryptography to live-cell imaging and spectroscopy.