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A source of entangled photons based on a cavity-enhanced and strain-tuned GaAs quantum dot

A quantum-light source that delivers photons with a high brightness and a high degree of entanglement is fundamental for the development of efficient entanglement-based quantum-key distribution systems. Among all possible candidates, epitaxial quantum dots are currently emerging as one of the brightest sources of highly entangled photons. However, the optimization of both brightness and entanglement currently requires different technologies that are difficult to combine in a scalable manner. In this work, we overcome this challenge by developing a novel device consisting of a quantum dot embedded in a circular Bragg resonator, in turn, integrated onto a micromachined piezoelectric actuator. The resonator engineers the light-matter interaction to empower extraction efficiencies up to 0.69(4). Simultaneously, the actuator manipulates strain fields that tune the quantum dot for the generation of entangled photons with corrected fidelities to a maximally entangled state up to 0.96(1). This hybrid technology has the potential to overcome the limitations of the key rates that plague QD-based entangled sources for entanglement-based quantum key distribution and entanglement-based quantum networks.

Magnetic-free chiral eigenmode spectroscopy for simultaneous sensitive measurement of optical rotary dispersion and circular dichroism

Chirality, defined by Lord Kelvin, refers to the geometric symmetry property of an object that cannot be superposed onto its mirror image using rotations and translations. The material’s chirality can be probed with light as the optical activity: optical rotary dispersion (ORD) and circular dichroism (CD). It is still challenging to yield extremely sensitive ORD and CD for very weak chirality and measure both simultaneously. Cavity ringdown polarimetry has been reported to improve ORD detection sensitivity with the absence of equally important CD signature, at the price of high cavity finesse near 400, frequency-locking sophistication, and large magnetic field. Here, we report a unique recipe to demonstrate the simultaneous measurement of ORD and the CD by separately observing the chiral eigenmode spectra from a bowtie optical cavity with a finesse about 30, without resorting to frequency locking or magnetic field. We obtain a sensitivity of ~2.7×10-3degHz for ORD, ~8.1×10-6Hz for CD, and a spectral resolution of 0.04 pm within a millisecond-scale measurement. We present a cost-effective yet ultrasensitive account for chiral chromatography, the conformational dynamics and chiroptical analysis of biological samples which particularly exhibit weak and narrow spectral signals.

Dr. Aydogan Ozcan received his Ph.D. degree at Stanford University Electrical Engineering Department. After a short post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he was appointed as a research faculty at Harvard Medical School, Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2006. Dr. Ozcan joined UCLA in 2007 and he is currently the Chancellor’s Professor and the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Innovation at UCLA and an HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at UCLA Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering Departments, and is also the Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.

Dr. Ozcan is elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and holds >70 issued/granted patents and more than 20 pending patent applications for his inventions in telemedicine, mobile health, nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, lensless imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and optical coherence tomography. Dr. Ozcan gave more than 100 plenary/keynote talks and 500+ invited talks and is also the author of one book, the co-author of more than 1000 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals and conferences. In addition, Dr. Ozcan is the founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Lucendi Inc. and Holomic/Cellmic LLC, which was named a Technology Pioneer by The World Economic Forum in 2015. Mobile diagnostics product lines and related assets of Cellmic were acquired by NOW Diagnostics Inc. in 2018. Dr. Ozcan is also the Founder of Pictor Labs. Ozcan led the fundraising and formation of Pictor Labs - a spin-off from his UCLA lab - which reported the first demonstration of AI-based digital tissue staining and telepathology, where biopsy samples were imaged, virtually stained, and diagnosed, each step performed at different cities in the US.

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Prof. Cheng-Wei Qiu received his B.Eng. (USTC) and Ph. D. (NUS) degree in 2003 and 2007, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Physics Department in MIT till the end of 2009. Since December 2009, he joined NUS as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in Jan 2017. From 1^st Jan 2018, he was promoted to Dean’s Chair Professor in Faculty of Engineering, NUS. He was the recipient of the SUMMA Graduate Fellowship in Advanced Electromagnetics in 2005, IEEE AP-S Graduate Research Award in 2006, URSI Young Scientist Award in 2008, NUS Young Investigator Award in 2011, MIT TR35@Singapore Award in 2012, Young Scientist Award by Singapore National Academy of Science in 2013, Faculty Young Research Award in NUS 2013, SPIE Rising Researcher Award 2018, Young Engineering Research Award 2018 in NUS. Dr. Qiu is a fellow of Optica (formerly OSA), SPIE, and The Electromagnetics Academy. His research is known for the structured light for beam manipulation and nanoparticle manipulation. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed journal papers. He was Highly Cited Researchers 2019 by Web of Science. He has been serving in Associate Editor for various journals such as PhotoniX, Photonics Research, and Editor-in-Chief for eLight. He also serves in Editorial Advisory Board for Laser and Photonics Review, Advanced Optical Materials, and ACS Photonics.