New Avenues for Quantum Information Processing with Light-Matter Interactions

Light-matter interaction (LMI) underpins numerous quantum technologies, yet persistent challenges—such as decoherence, scalability, and speed—limit the advancement of quantum information processing (QIP) in this promising platform. These limitations motivate the search for alternative quantum hardware leveraging LMI to overcome these barriers and unveil new opportunities for QIP.

In this seminar, I will demonstrate how combining diverse concepts, components, and building blocks in quantum optics leads to such novel approaches for QIP. First, I will introduce free electrons as a new and promising resource in quantum optics, enabling ultrafast operation, strong coupling, and single-photon nonlinearities in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). Next, I will show how the integration of concepts from nonlinear optics into waveguide QED unlocks novel schemes for many-body entanglement generation and enables access to exotic physics in atomic arrays. Finally, I will present a scalable architecture for processing high-dimensional photonic entanglement, inspired by the variational principle in physics and realized through self-configuring photonic networks.