Photonic circuits with light patterns

Abstract

Optical circuits leveraging structured light—the precise control of light’s degrees of freedom (DOFs), including transverse space (i.e amplitude and phase), frequency, and polarization—offer a promising platform for quantum information processing tasks. Information can be encoded in high dimensional states, and different degrees of freedom can be coupled creating hybrid structures for complex operations. Recent advancements in tunability techniques, particularly through spatial light modulators (SLMs), have enabled the precise encoding of light patterns as holograms. This capability facilitates complex, programmable operations with applications in imaging, cryptography, and communications, making SLMs indispensable tools for manipulating high-dimensional optical fields. Building on these advancements, this dissertation explores how SLM-powered optical circuits can encode unitary operations by dynamically shaping light patterns to perform matrix multiplications—an essential component of quantum computation. The core contribution of this work is the demonstration of optical matrix multiplication as a means to emulate quantum computations, where quantum states are encoded as spatial light patterns and unitary operations are implemented via phase modulation. This approach exploits the inherent parallelism of the transverse spatial degree of freedom to efficiently simulate quantum algorithms within an optical framework. By establishing a framework for optical circuits with structured light patterns, this dissertation provides a pathway for leveraging classical optical systems to simulate quantum computations. Inspired by Jozsa’s insight that classical waves can efficiently mimic quantum algorithms without requiring entanglement, these findings contribute to the growing field of hybrid classical-quantum computing and highlight the potential of optical platforms in advancing scalable quantum technologies.