Layered Materials as Building Blocks for Higher Dimensional Classical and Quantum Optoelectronics Infrastructure

Classical and quantum computing devices need to ferry vast amounts of data and optical interconnects provide a promising approach allowing faster speeds and larger bandwidths. Critical interconnect components are light sources, waveguides and detectors. Currently, the information is encoded in intensity and frequency but other degrees of freedom (DOFs) such as photon spin and spatial orbital angular momentum modes (OAM) should be utilized to enhance the capacity of optical links. Therefore, new photonic materials and devices that can produce, transmit and detect light with complex polarization and spatial modes are needed. This is non-trivial as most materials are insensitive to chiral light. The development of on-chip chiral photonic devices requires fundamental investigations and manipulation of momentum space geometry, topology and optical nonlinearity in materials and their coupling to the environment to engineer specific interactions to control and detect the vectorial states of light. We will discuss some recent developments towards the development of on-chip devices that produce different SAM-OAM states and photodetectors utilizing layered materials that are uniquely sensitive to SAM-OAM modes. The direct transduction of photocurrents mapped to various SAM-OAM coupled states is engineered via nonlocal light-matter interactions that cannot be described within the electric-dipole approximation and requires a theoretical description accounting for the topology of electronic bands and light. We will then describe our efforts to utilize super-moire structures with lengthscales comparable to optical wavelengths to engineer responses with large optical nonlinearities couped to higher-order quantum geometric terms to understand and fabricate nonlinear photodetectors. Either by protecting or breaking certain symmetries in materials, prospects of designing new quantum photonic materials and devices will be discussed that can enable the next generation of classical and quantum photonic devices that can encode, manipulate, transmit and sense information encoded in different SAM-OAM modes of light.