APAM Fall Faculty Research Conference (September): Prof Sherry Zhang

About the Fall Faculty Research Conference: Each month, an APAM Professor presents their research; 4 different speakers across the various disciplines in the Department.

About the September Speaker: Can you guess our first speaker? This APAM faculty member plays with the same physics using two kinds of photons separated by five orders of magnitude in energy.


The September speaker is... Professor Sherry Zhang!

Title: "Interfacing spins and photons in silicon"

Abstract: Silicon offers a rare combination of mature photonic integration and a low-noise host environment for solid-state spins, making it a promising platform for scalable quantum networks. I will present recent progress with T centers—carbon-hydrogen defects in silicon—that provide optically addressable electron and nuclear spin qubits with telecom O-band optical transitions. I will focus first on coherent spin control and optical readout in integrated silicon photonics, including a three-qubit register formed by a T-center electron spin coupled to nearby hydrogen and silicon nuclear spins.  I will then briefly discuss the photonic ingredients needed to connect these memories: photonic crystal cavity arrays coupled to bus waveguides for wavelength-multiplexed emission, and measurements identifying laser-induced spectral diffusion as a key source of optical linewidth broadening. Together, these results show how silicon T centers can combine local spin registers with scalable photonic integration, providing key building blocks for silicon-based quantum networks.

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