UMD Joins NSF-funded $25M Center for Optoelectronic, Quantum Technologies

The National Science Foundation has announced a five-year, $25 million grant to fund a multi-institutional center including the University of Maryland that will conduct research to bring atomic-level precision to the devices and technologies that underpin much of modern life.

The Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand (IMOD) is a collaboration of scientists and engineers at 11 universities led by the University of Washington. UMD faculty involved with IMOD include three professors of electrical and computer engineering and physics: Edo Waks, associate director of the Quantum Technology Center (QTC), Ronald Walsworth, founding director of the QTC; and Mohammad Hafezi, a fellow of QTC.

IMOD research will center on new semiconductor materials and scalable manufacturing processes for new devices based on optoelectronics, the study and application of electronic devices that produce, detect and control light. Applications would range from displays and sensors to a technological revolution, under development today, that’s based on harnessing the principles of quantum mechanics.

“Our work will develop new classes of colloidal materials that can generate quantum light with unprecedented efficiency, and enable strong photon-photon interactions,” said Waks, who serves as UMD’s lead investigator. “These are the key building blocks for photonics-based quantum information processing.”

The goal of the center is to realize high-impact platforms for quantum networking and sensing, Walsworth said.

“As a key part of IMOD, QTC researchers will lead efforts to establish a new class of quantum materials that combine pristine optical properties and long qubit coherence times,” he said.

The other academic institutions in IMOD are the University of Pennsylvania; Lehigh University; Columbia University; Georgia Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; City College of New York; the University of Chicago; the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

External partners include Amazon, Corning, Microsoft and Nanosys, as well as government organizations like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.