Applied Physics Seminar

Abstract:

Piezoelectricity is a property of materials that lack inversion symmetry and allows coupling between electric fields and strain. In this talk, I will give an overview of two classes of microsystems that harness piezoelectric coupling for applications in quantum science and information processing. First, I will describe recent work in piezoelectrically actuated and optomechanically tuned VLSI photonic circuits that are helping solve long-standing challenges in quantum computing and networking at scale. Then I will describe how giant phononic nonlinearities can be generated using electron-phonon coupling in specially designed piezoelectric devices and how these nonlinearities can be leveraged to provide new functionality for quantum information processing with phonons.

More about the Speaker:

Matt Eichenfield is an Associate Professor and the SPIE Endowed Chair in University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences and a Distinguished Faculty Joint Appointee at Sandia National Labs. He received his BS in physics from UNLV in 2004 and his PhD in physics from Caltech in 2010 in the group of Professor Oskar Painter. After finishing his PhD, he was a Kavli Nanoscience Prize Postdoctoral Fellow before joining Sandia as a Harry S. Truman Fellow in 2011. At Sandia he founded and led the MEMS-Enabled Quantum Systems group until beginning his joint appointment in 2022.