1st Jagadish Chandra Bose Lecture by Prof. Robert Fickler
You are cordially invited to the 1st Jagadish Chandra Bose Lecture organised by the DPS.
Speaker: Prof. Robert Fickler
Title: Quantum optics with structured light
Abstract: Structured light, i.e. light fields with a non-trivial shape in time, space, and polarization, has become a versatile approach to explore fundamental optics effects and develop novel applications in fields such as microscopy, imaging, optical communications, and quantum technologies, to name a few. In this talk, I will first introduce the field of structured light along with some of its applications in classical and quantum optics. Following this introduction, I will focus on two of our recent quantum optics experiments exploring nonlinear optical processes and structured light. In the first experiment, we test the fundamental law of angular momentum conservation commonly assumed for photons in nonlinear frequency conversion processes. We show that the angular momentum conservation still holds on the single photon level and outline a scheme to leverage it for the generation of high-dimensional multi-photon quantum states. In second experiment, I will present so-called quantum frequency conversion process which we control using structured light. In our approach a single photon is not only converted from one frequency to another, but its entanglement with a partner photon is simultaneously changed from being in polarization to the spatial profile of the photon. We show that the preservation of entanglement (non-local) during this process is conditioned upon the classical non-separability (local) of the structured field that drives the process. Not only show our results an interesting link between classical and quantum non-separability but they will also enable novel studies in open quantum systems and quantum nonlinear optical applications.
About Speaker: Robert Fickler received his doctoral degree from the University of Vienna (Austria) in 2014 working in the group of Anton Zeilinger. After postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Ottawa (Canada) in the groups of Bob Boyd and Ebrahim Karimi and the IQOQI-Vienna (Austria) in the group of Marcus Huber, he joined Tampere University (Finland), where he is leading the Experimental Quantum Optics group as an Professor IN Photonics. Together with his group, he is working on complex structures of photons for high-dimensional quantum information as well as quantum foundations. The group also works on structuring matter waves and investigates fundamental light-matter interactions schemes. He was awarded the Academy Research Fellowship of the Research Council of Finland in 2020 and the ERC Starting Grant by the European Union in 2021.
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Posted on: December 5th, 2025