DARPA Seeks to Harness Novel Light-matter Hybrids Like Photonic Molecules and Photon Fluids

DARPA will give an information session on the Photon-Efficient Nanoscale Optical Metrology (PhENOM) Disruption Opportunity.

Photon-Efficient Nanoscale Optical Metrology (PhENOM), seeks to harness novel light-matter hybrids, such as photonic molecules & photon ‘fluids’ for novel applications.

The PhENOM DO will explore and demonstrate disruptive approaches to loss-resilient generation, detection, and information-encoding of quantum correlated states of light. Applications of these approaches of interest to PhENOM include photon-efficient low-light imaging across the electromagnetic spectrum; few-photon control and readout of solid-state or atomic quantum sensors and qubits for quantum information processing (QIS); and loss resilient protocols of optical communication.

Despite the wide application landscape and the relatively established methods of generating quantum states of light, tangible application instances of quantum-enhanced optical metrology are scarce. This is due to the fact that conventional measurement schemes that seek to leverage squeezed or entangled states of light are invariably thwarted by the presence of optical loss
and detection inefficiencies. The rapid degradation of metrological utility with even moderate levels of loss has implied that similar or better measurement precision, accuracy, or resolution can be obtained with classical light sources at higher intensities or longer measurement durations. As such, putative application domains of quantum correlated light have tended to
focus on situations that demand extremely low light levels.

Alternate paradigms have emerged from the confluence of advances in atomic physics, nanophotonics, and a rapidly growing sophistication in synthesis, nanofabrication, and heterogeneous integration of nonlinear optical architectures. These developments augur disruptive capabilities in quantum optical metrology including the use of Purcell-enhanced quantum emitters for the deterministic generation of novel correlated and multiphoton states of light, new techniques of loss-resilient information encoding for applications ranging from quantum error correction to assured communication protocols, and the quantum-limited collection and detection of light across the electromagnetic spectrum from the millimeterwave to the X-ray. The PhENOM DO seeks to leverage this rapidly growing landscape of strongly interacting light-matter hybrid platforms and architectures to demonstrate new capabilities in loss-resilient and quantum-limited optical measurement and control techniques.