Summary
An efficient source of terahertz radiation has the potential to improve characterization methods for drugs, proteins and bacteria, enable ultra-fast wireless data transfer over short distances for use in “smart factories”, and offer enhanced detection capabilities with the ability to see through packaging. However, terahertz light is particularly difficult to produce, and existing sources remain too bulky and power-hungry for widespread application.
We are working to develop more compact and efficient terahertz light sources using polaritons – hybrid particles consisting of a photon coupled strongly with a material excitation. This approach utilizes a plethora of quantum phenomena, from trapped photons, to quasiparticles, to Bose-Einstein condensation. By exploiting these unconventional effects we hope to pave the way towards a long-awaited practical source of terahertz light.
Related Content
Zero-Dimensional Quantum Materials for the Next Generation of Highly-Selective Chemical Sensors
Summary Heavy metals are a major public health concern and their on-site detection in water supplies is not well served by existing lab techniques. We develop a new multi-modal platform comprising functionalized quantum dots of two-dimensional materials (2D-QDs) for the sensing of four highly-toxic heavy metal pollutants (arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury). The zero-dimensional […]
March 11, 2019
Towards large area, resonant quantum tunneling diodes by continuous Langmuir transfer of exfoliated 2D materials
Summary Atomically thin 2D materials constitute promising building blocks for quantum devices due to their exotic, layer-dependent electronic properties. The ability to stack these materials in alternating layers enables heterostructures to be built in almost limitless combinations and over small enough length scales to observe quantum phenomena. So far though, practical implementation of devices based […]
April 1, 2020
Entangled States of Beams and their Applications
Summary With David Cory and collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) we explore how to engineer beams of neutron or photons that carry entanglement. The degrees of freedom that can be entangled include spin (polarization), momentum, displacement, and angular momentum. These have potential applications ranging from studies of helical internal magnetic fields […]
September 7, 2016
Novel High-Speed Receiver for Quantum Communication and Sensing
Summary An essential aspect of a quantum channel is the detection and analysis of quantum signals in the form of photons. For most free-space applications, the photons are polarization encoded, e.g. by assigning the ‘0’ to horizontally polarized photons and ‘1’ to vertically polarized photons. However, where the geometric reference is not constant at all […]
January 1, 2019