IQC Colloquium featuring Arka Majumdar

Monday, March 30, 2026 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)

Programmable Photonic Coupled Cavity Arrays

Arka Majumdar | University of Washington, Seattle

Analog quantum simulators offer a powerful alternative to digital computation for studying complex many-body systems. By programming a scalable, controllable "model quantum system," we can mimic the behavior of exotic Hamiltonians and realize synthetic quantum metamaterials with properties not found in nature. Photons are an ideal substrate for this task; their high energy and weak environmental coupling ensure long-lived quantum states even at room temperature, while integrated photonics allows for large-scale, chip-based implementations. However, standard Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) often lack two pillars essential for quantum simulation: reconfigurability and nonlinearity. In this talk, I will describe our recent progress in overcoming the challenge of programmability. Specifically, we have developed a silicon photonic coupled cavity array consisting of eight high-quality-factor resonators, each equipped with custom-designed thermo-optic island heaters for independent control. By achieving a 50% reduction in thermal crosstalk compared to traditional heating architectures, we demonstrate a fully programmable device capable of implementing tight-binding Hamiltonians with access to the full eigen-energy spectrum. I will detail our control scheme for mapping specific Hamiltonians onto the array and conclude by discussing our ongoing efforts to integrate non-volatile phase-change materials (PCMs), which provide a path toward unprecedented, localized, and zero-power controllability in integrated quantum photonics.

Bio: Prof. Arka Majumdar is a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Washington (UW). He is also a visiting scientist in Meta Reality Labs (2025-current). He received B. Tech. from IIT-Kharagpur (2007), where he was honored with the President’s Gold Medal. He completed his MS (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley (2012-13), and then in Intel Labs (2013-14) as postdoc before joining UW. His research interests include developing a hybrid nanophotonic platform using emerging material systems for optical information science, imaging, and microscopy. Prof. Majumdar is the recipient of multiple Young Investigator Awards from the AFOSR (2015), NSF (2019), ONR (2020) and DARPA (2021), Intel early career faculty award (2015), Amazon Catalyst Award (2016), Alfred P. Sloan fellowship (2018), UW college of engineering outstanding junior faculty award (2020), iCANX Young Scientist Award (2021), IIT-Kharagpur Young Alumni Achiever Award (2022), DARPA Director’s Award (2023), and Rising star of light award (2023). He is an Optica (2024) and SPIE (2025) fellow. He is co-founder and technical advisor of Tunoptix, a startup commercializing software defined meta-optics. Group Page: https://labs.ece.uw.edu/amlab/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arka-majumdar-ba582983/

IQC faculty host: Michal Bajcsy