#photoniccircuits

[govindhtech]

KAUST Quantum Computing launches National quantum foundry

The Saudi Arabian Quantum Foundry at KAUST marks a new era in sovereign hardware fabrication.

KaUST Quantum Computing

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) announced the development of the KAUST Quantum Foundry, a major technical advancement in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia's “Vision 2030” policy changed from consumer to producer of commercial-grade, repeatable quantum hardware with the national initiative.

Strategic Change: Research to Industrial Scalability Superconducting qubits and complicated photonic circuits have been created using “bespoke” and lab-specific methods. Scaling up these devices for industrial use is difficult because they are often handcrafted by research teams. KAUST Quantum Foundry uses an industrial-grade, high-precision operating approach to eliminate this bottleneck.

The Foundry provides coordinated, shared access to KAUST's cutting-edge cleanrooms for device prototype and process development, distinguishing it from other nanofabrication institutes. Process standardization is needed to generate quantum hardware as consistently as conventional semiconductors.

Process Design Kits' Power

Process Design Kits (PDKs) underpin the Foundry's technological foundation. These kits transform industry partners and scholars. PDKs provide fabrication recipes and design standards to help engineers create hardware that works consistently.

This shift from “trial and error” academic research creates a reliable path for scaling prototypes into mass-producible quantum devices. The Foundry supports the Kingdom's long-term innovation ambitions and KAUST's national leadership in research infrastructure by implementing these explicit protocols.

A Multi-Platform, Phased Approach

The Foundry is being implemented gradually as infrastructure and understanding improve. The facility is platform-neutral because the architecture for the “quantum winner”—photonic, hybrid, or superconducting—has yet to be determined.

The Foundry supports numerous crucial technology paths:

Superconducting Circuits: Using extremely cold, noise-free conditions for the most popular quantum bits. Quantum photonics uses light for secure communications and speedy computing. Hybrid Platforms: Seeking to combine quantum modalities for more dependable and error-resistant technologies.

Strengthening National Strategic Missions

KAUST Quantum Foundry building is linked to Saudi Arabia's economic diversification and national security goals. The facility is more than an academic exercise because it solves complex scientific problems that standard computing cannot.

The Foundry works with the National Transformation Institute (NTI) to accelerate “early-stage commercialization,” the difficult process of turning a successful laboratory test into a commercially viable industrial product. These activities focus on four essential strategic missions:

Energy: Developing quantum-enhanced sensors for gas and oil reserves and renewable energy networks. Health: Developing new drugs via quantum-powered materials discovery. Food Security: Advanced agricultural modeling. Water Security: Quantum-informed material science improves desalination.

Quantum and AI Convergence

One of KAUST's main advantages is its AI synergy. Traditional supercomputers are reaching their physical limits as AI models become more data-intensive. The KAUST Quantum Foundry develops AI "quantum accelerators" hardware. The Foundry combines quantum simulation and sensing with the university's AI leadership to overcome scientific challenges and make the Kingdom a global center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Talent Gap and Workforce Development

Due to the global quantum skills gap, the Foundry was founded. With its hands-on manufacturing lab, KAUST is training a new generation of Saudi quantum engineers and physicists.

The Foundry emphasizes “hardware-first” quantum literacy training, unlike regional efforts like the “Quantum for Society” competition. This ensures that the Kingdom can build and maintain devices that run such algorithms and generate quantum code.

Quantum Sovereignty Globally

Saudi Arabia plans to create a 1,000-qubit machine and lead the global south in the quantum age with a $2.3 billion national quantum strategy. The KAUST Quantum Foundry may be the "brick and mortar" confirmation of this ambition.

The Kingdom has “strategic quantum sovereignty” since it can develop these components domestically while geopolitical conflicts impair global supply chains for advanced semiconductors and quantum hardware. Building a self-sufficient quantum hardware ecosystem ensures Saudi Arabia's place in a future when quantum technology determines economic and national power.

The KAUST Quantum Foundry is currently open for collaboration with academic and business leaders, so the next quantum revolution may be written on the Red Sea.

[govindhtech]

DeepQuantum: Unifying 3 Paradigms Of Quantum Computing

DeepQuantum, an open-source software platform developed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) scientists, unites three quantum computing paradigms into a single framework, a major quantum research breakthrough. Yu-Ze Zhu, Ke-Ming Hu, and Jun-Jie He established the platform to overcome the field's historical division. DeepQuantum allows researchers to construct quantum algorithms and hybrid machine-learning systems in a consistent environment through “closed-loop integration” of quantum computational models. Developers say this is an industry first.

Uniting a Broken Landscape

Quantum computing has long promised exponential speedups in simulations, materials science, and encryption. The need for separate tools to manage many computational paradigms has hindered the deployment of these theories. In the past, measurement-based, gate-based, and photonic circuit researchers had to navigate many software stacks, which impeded cross-platform experimentation and development.

DeepQuantum supports all three main models simultaneously to overcome this issue. This eliminates “artificial boundaries” between approaches, allowing hybrid algorithms that take advantage of each computing style's advantages. DeepQuantum provides a single interface for measurement-driven workflows using entangled resource states, light-based photonic architectures, or gate-model logic.

PyTorch Integration Power

Because it's built on PyTorch, a popular classical machine learning framework, DeepQuantum stands out. Remember that Meta's AI Research division invented PyTorch, which is popular for its adaptability and dynamic computational graphs. By using this well-known infrastructure, DeepQuantum lowers the entry hurdle for software engineers and AI practitioners who may not understand quantum physics.

PyTorch lets users use native capabilities like automated differentiation and optimisers. QML requires alternating classical and quantum operations to train variational algorithms and quantum neural networks, making this crucial. DeepQuantum integrates AI and quantum physics by enabling on-chip model training and hybrid quantum-classical workloads.

Flexible Backends and Architecture

Three core classes fulfil diverse simulation needs in DeepQuantum's architecture:

QubitCircuit: This class supports gate-based calculations in most contemporary quantum devices.

QumodeCircuit: Photonic quantum computing and continuous-variable systems dominate this class. Its adaptable toolkit for light-based quantum logic research includes Fock, Gaussian, and Bosonic mode sub-backends.

Pattern: Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is easier to develop and research because it uses patterns of measurement results instead of sequential gates.

This versatility lets researchers choose the optimal representation for their task, whether representing superconducting qubit logic or photon activity.

High-Performance Simulation on Standard Hardware DeepQuantum's advanced simulations can replace expensive, limited-scale quantum apparatus. A distributed parallel computing architecture and tensor network methods allow the framework to describe complex systems that conventional hardware cannot.

In benchmarks, DeepQuantum simulated circuits with over 100 qubits on a single high-end laptop. PyTorch's built-in communication protocols enable multi-node and multi-GPU clusters for more sophisticated tasks. Tests and prototypes require this feature before algorithms like the quantum Fourier transform are implemented on noisy quantum processors.

Funding and Global Setting

Several Chinese national and regional funding sources helped develop DeepQuantum. Major donors include the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (STCSM), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and the National Key R&D Program. The SJTU Startup Fund for Young Faculty and Zhiyuan Future Scholar Program contributed.

Global investment in quantum technologies is rising as DeepQuantum emerges. Even while major industry races towards fault-tolerant systems, many researchers are immediately focused on the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) phase. Due to the low qubit count and error-proneness of current devices, DeepQuantum's hybrid quantum-classical processes are essential for meaningful applications.

Looking Ahead

Despite its powers, DeepQuantum recognises it faces several challenges. Scalability is a critical issue for real-world quantum systems due to error rates and limited connection. Future platform development may focus on error correction, noise mitigation, usability, and documentation to increase community adoption.

Open-source framework DeepQuantum combines PennyLane, Cirq, and Qiskit. It wants international cooperation to foster the interchange and replication of quantum chemistry, materials discovery, and financial optimisation technologies.

DeepQuantum shifts quantum software development from discrete hardware models to a multi-paradigm technique. Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers combined these complex systems with common AI technologies to develop a powerful new quantum discovery engine.

[govindhtech]

Topological Biphoton Entanglement Advance Quantum Photonics

Biphoton entanglement is crucial to information technology development for high-resolution imaging and secure communications. Researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Ningbo University, and other institutions have recently demonstrated a novel method for manipulating quantum systems' topological properties to create tailored topological biphoton entanglement, but they are still looking for new ways to generate and control these entangled states.

The team led by Wei-Wei Zhang, Chao Chen, and Jizhou Wu has used nonlinear materials in waveguide lattices to regulate topological biphoton entanglement independently. The system's inherent nonlinear interactions shape quantum entanglement and provide a previously unattainable control mechanism. Reusable, adaptive photonic chips for dependable, fault-tolerant information processing and topological biphoton entanglement using pump activation are possible with this development.

Using Topological Photonics with Nonlinearity

Topological photonics, like topological insulators, underpins this study. This technology provides photonic waveguides with topological protection -- robust light propagation—by eliminating defects and disorder. Final goal is programmable, scalable photonic devices for quantum information processing and maybe classical signal processing.

These topologically protected circuits were modified with nonlinear optical materials and effects to create complex quantum states and execute quantum gates. In particular, they examined a nonlinear gain/loss mechanism in nearest-neighbor waveguide coupling and the third-order Kerr nonlinearity effect. These components are necessary for system behaviour management.

They used a defective Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model in silicon waveguide devices to achieve their idea. This setup used a “long-long defect” design to place nonlinear materials near the defect. Given this nonlinear material, the injected pump power controls waveguide hopping strength.

Self-Induced Manipulation Mechanism The primary innovation is using injected pump power to change system topology. The researchers showed that nonlinearity in the waveguide lattice structure can actively regulate defect topology.

Self-induced modulation of nonlinear couplings at defects begins with the injection of a pump signal in a system with topologically trivial modes. The intense pump light influences the signal and idler photons (biphotons) through Spontaneous Four-Wave Mixing (SFWM).

Simulations showed pump strength-dependent dynamics changed considerably. Similar to a system without nonlinear materials, low pump power diffuses pump light throughout the lattice. However, raising pump power causes the injected pump to oscillation around the trouble regions. Due to pump power, the waveguide chip's defect topology may have changed from a long-standing flaw to a new one.

This adjustment is crucial because it causes minor localised modes. The trivial localised states act as a "bridge," overlapping the topological zero-energy eigenmode during SFWM. This overlap is the main way topological modes create biphotons.

Quantifying Robustness and Entanglement

The output's topological biphoton entanglement weight confirmed the manipulation process. The topological biphoton entanglement weight initially increased to 35 units, then reduced as pump power increased from 0 to 100 units. The decline at very high power is caused by the topological configuration moving again, reducing the overlap between the trivial localised eigenmodes and the topological zero-energy eigenmode.

Importantly, the topological states are naturally perturbation-resistant. To evaluate manufacturing discrepancies, the waveguide coupling was simulated for off-diagonal disorder. Results show that the approach can create topological biphoton states even with a high disorder strength of η=0.5, proving the reliability and reusability of silicon waveguide circuits.

Industrialisation and Future Platforms

Topological and nonlinear photonic circuits are built on silicon nitride chips for integration, scalability, and miniaturisation. The design's CMOS compatibility may accelerate industrial adoption of topology-enhanced quantum photonic circuits, cutting operating costs and promoting quantum technologies.

Researchers suggested using a flexible, programmable time-bin encoding technology. This configuration dynamically adjusts coupling strength utilizing fibre loops to encode lattice sites and an FPGA to calculate feedback signals based on pump power to imitate pump-dependent nonlinear coupling. Current “active” topological photonics platforms include this extension.

This externally adjustable design with programmable quantum routing and noise-resilient quantum logic lays the groundwork for scalable quantum computing systems and city-scale quantum communication networks. This work bridges nonlinear topology and quantum photonics to provide a scalable solution for robust quantum information processing, advancing quantum technology industrialization.

[govindhtech]

NTT Research Inc Unveils World’s First Nonlinear Photonic Chip

The First Programmable Nonlinear Photonics Chip from NTT Research Breaks the Decade-Old “One Device, One Function” Rule NTT Research Inc.

NTT Research Inc. announced the first programmable nonlinear photonic waveguide, a huge technological advance. NTT's Physics and Informatics (PHI) Lab, Stanford University, and Cornell University achieved this breakthrough, which revolutionizes nonlinear photonic devices. The gadget should break the decades-old “one device, one function” restriction in photonic engineering.

Revolutionizing Photonic Circuits

Photonic chips usually have one hard-wired function. During fabrication, device functionality is fixed. A waveguide that doubles a laser's frequency must have a different geometry than one that shapes pulses. The susceptibility of optical production to microscopic errors limits photonic system scalability and manufacturing yields, and the need for accurate, distinct dimensions for each function boosts costs and complexity. NTT's new waveguide solves these issues by making the core's nonlinearity changeable. The gadget uses a dynamically tunable nonlinear silicon-nitride core. The core projects an external “programming light” onto the semiconductor to create spatially patterned refractive indices. When signal light passes through, these indices influence the nonlinear interaction. By changing the chip's light pattern, the same physical structure may immediately switch between at least four functions. According to study leader Ryotatsu Yanagimoto, the findings “mark a departure from the conventional paradigm of nonlinear optics.” This opens up applications that require high yields and fast device reconfigurability, he said.

Proven Capabilities and Strength

Electric field nonlinearities, a neglected phenomena, are employed in the underlying technology. The crew managed this changing refractive-index terrain with outstanding accuracy and agility. Trials showed the researchers could switch between: Pulse structuring arbitrary over 10 terahertz range. Widely adjustable second-harmonic generation with 100-nanometer bandwidth. Spatial-spectrally structured light is holographically generated with above 95% quality. Real-time inverse nonlinear-optical function design. Importantly, this technology resists environmental drifts and fabrication errors. Reprogramming the design on the fly lets the semiconductor adapt to environmental or manufacturing changes.

Collaboration, Inverse Design

The project was coordinated by NTT's PHI Lab using two top universities' strengths. Cornell associate professor of electrical engineering Peter L. McMahon directed the work and supplied silicon-photonic design and waveguide fabrication expertise. Stanford University created a crucial structured-light projection technology for writing nonlinear patterns onto the semiconductor. The project used inverse design successfully. Using a machine-learning technique, the scientists could define a desired optical response and have the gadget produce the exact light pattern needed in the waveguide.

Speeding the $50 Billion Photonic Market

This programmable waveguide breakthrough is timely because the photonic-integrated-circuit (PIC) industry is predicted to produce over $50 billion by 2035. This technology solves major industry problems by simplifying and cutting costs. Possible benefits include: Cost reduction: A single programmable chip that can perform multiple jobs may be cheaper than several specialized devices. Programming devices after creation allows for manufacturing flaw correction, which boosts yields, which are crucial for large-scale optical circuits. Single, multipurpose devices reduce optical system complexity and size. The applications cover various fast-growing markets. Combining modulators, frequency converters, and pulse shapers on a programmable chip could simplify 5G and 6G network architecture. Programmable quantum frequency converters and quantum light sources may enable more flexible quantum computer designs. This allows quantum processors to change their gate sets without hardware changes, which is essential for scaling qubit numbers. The platform aids sensing and imaging by illuminating LiDAR systems or improving microscope resolution and contrast.

Path to Quantum Regimes

Future research will focus on bringing the device to quantum regimes. The mechanism that modulates the refractive index with light may be used to shape quantum states of light in situ, although current demonstrations are limited to classical nonlinear optics. The group also plans to investigate materials with stronger electric-field-induced nonlinearities to reduce reprogramming power and boost device bandwidth.