Valeria Saggio

Research Abstract:

In the field of quantum information processing, artificial atoms in solids are leading candidates for quantum networks, scalable quantum computing, and sensing, as they combine long-lived spins with mobile and robust photonic qubits. A central goal is to realize photonic plaforms that can scale and individually address and control single atoms. Recently, silicon has emerged as a promising host material where artificial atoms with long spin coherence times and emission into the telecommunications band can be controllably created and addressed. This field leverages the maturity of silicon photonics to embed quantum emitters into the world’s most advanced microelectronics and photonics platform. However, a current bottleneck is the naturally weak emission rate of artificial atoms. An open challenge is to enhance this interaction via coupling to an optical cavity. In my talk, I will address the demonstration of cavity-enhanced single artificial atoms at telecommunication wavelengths in silicon. In particular, I will show controllable cavity-coupling of single G-centers in the telecommunications O-band using photonic crystal cavities optimized via inverse design. These results show intensity enhancement of G-centers as well as highly pure and efficient single-photon emission, paving the way towards scalable quantum information processing.

Bio:

Valeria Saggio is currently a postdoctoral associate working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the group of Prof. Dirk Englund. Her research has a strong focus on solid-state photonic platforms for scalable quantum computing and machine learning. She obtained her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Vienna (Austria) in 2021 under the supervision of Prof. Philip Walther. There, she worked on entanglement detection in photonic cluster states as well as on applications of quantum computing to reinforcement learning. She was the recipient of the mobility fellowship of the Vienna Doctoral School in Physics, and her doctoral thesis was awarded four prizes, including that of the Austrian ministry of Education. Previously, she carried out her Master thesis at the University of Florence (Italy) and did an internship at the Queen's University Belfast (UK) during her studies at the University of Catania (Italy), where she obtained her B.A. and M.S. in Physics.