Colloquium: Dr. Matthew Doty | University of Delaware

TITLE:  Material and Device Foundations for Scalable Quantum Photonic Technologies

ABSTRACT: The “Second Quantum Revolution” promises a wide range of technological advances, including fundamentally secure information transmission, quantum computers that can outperform even the most powerful classical supercomputer, and new sensing methods for detecting everything from dark matter to magnetic activity in the human brain. There has been amazing progress toward realizing this promise, but many fundamental science and engineering challenges remain. I will start with a brief introduction to quantum technologies and review some the challenges to realizing these technologies at scale. I will then focus on photonic quantum technologies and show how the synthesis of new materials enabled the discovery of new physics that, in turn, enabled the design of new devices that could overcome several important scaling limits. I will close with a brief description of UD’s graduate degree program in Quantum Science and Engineering, which trains a workforce that can attack such technological challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Bio: Matt Doty earned a B.S. in physics from The Pennsylvania State University in 1998 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. He spent three years as a National Research Council Research Associate at the Naval Research Laboratory before joining the University of Delaware in 2007. He was, for 7 years, the faculty director of the UD Nanofabrication Facility and is now Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Director of the Quantum Science and Engineering graduate program. Prof. Doty’s research is focused on understanding and controlling light matter interactions in solid state materials for applications in solar energy harvesting and quantum photonics.