Research Interests

Optical Quantum Computing

Optical systems are a promising candidate for encoding and manipulating quantum information. Photons interact very weakly with their environment- polarization qubits have the lowest intrinsic decoherence of any physical system explored to date and the sources of decoherence are well characterised. Despite this, the polarisation state of photons can be easily manipulated with passive waveplates. Optical qubits are a natural choice for quantum communication, hence they seamlessly combining computation and communication tasks. The challenge with optical qubits is creating multi-qubit gates and there are several directions being investigated.

Device Characterisation

In the development of quantum information processing many groups around the world are beginning to create small scale quantum devices. To ensure the quality of these devices, effective characterisation is necessary. This allows us to ascertain to what degree these devices are performing their designed operations. This task is even more critical during development where good diagnostics are crucial to understand and overcome the physical processes that may limit the device's function.

Unfortunately, the complexity of these devices is beginning to outstrip our ability to characterise and debug them. This problem will rapidly become critical as the devices become larger. This project aims to develop practical quantum state and device characterisation techniques which will immediately benefit the development of this exciting field.