Speaker

Christian Haffner

Principal Member of Technical Staff - imec

Biography

Christian Haffner is a Principal Member of Technical Staff and the first one to receive imec’s tenure track. His tenure project investigates the fundamental limits of electro-optical devices for classical and quantum applications – or in simple words how small can a light switch be made. This research will eventually allow optical communication to happen at shorter and shorter distances even down to the chip-level. The quality of this research effort is confirmed by the competitive ERC starting grant being awarded to support his research. In 2019, he joined the 5-year Branco-Weiss Fellowship program. He did his Postdoc research on nano-scale opto-mechanical switches at NIST, Gaithersburg and ETH, Zurich. He earned his Ph.D. degree from ETH Zurich in 2018, which was recognized with the ETH Medal and Hans-Eggenberger Prize. His PhD research focused on using plasmonics as an active electro-optic device technology. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany)in 2012 and in 2013, respectively. He was the top-ranked student in his master class. During his study, he received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. His research has appeared in high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Photonics, Science and Nano Letters. His publications have been highlighted by news outlets like the OSA’s Optics and Photonics News and the IEEE Spectrum.

Talk(s)

10:30 AM

Developing tomorrow’s quantum photonic hardware

Quantum computers face many bottlenecks towards upscaling the number of qubits and increasing their computational power. To manipulate and measure the qubits, electrical signals need to be sent from the cryostat to the room temperature control electronics and vice versa using radio frequency (RF) interconnects. The bandwidth and thermal isolation limitations of these electrical interconnects poses a bottleneck. And like for their classical counterparts, hope lies in replacing the RF-links by optical fibers, resulting in a hybrid situation where RF-qubits will be used for computation and optical qubits will serve for remote communication. However, quantum photonic hardware capable of transducing electrical to optical quantum signals have so far remained elusive. At imec, we are pushing the boundaries of quantum photonic hardware by combining fundamental material research into novel electro-optical materials with novel device concepts and trying to bring them to life by our advanced integration capabilities. Achieving this ambitious goal would also enable classical photonic hardware that could push the boundaries of light communication towards shortest reach such as inter and intra chip communications.