Research Projects

During my PhD I was involved in three projects, with code names “PolaFlow”, “SQUIRREL” and “CLAQUE”. During the projects, I worked at the UAM and collaborated with the Italian CNR

Claque

CLAQUE (Classical and Quantum Electrodynamics of light-matter coupling) was a project funded by the Spanish ministry of economics, of which Dr Elena del Valle is a PI. It is a collaborative theoretical project which aims to address open, fundamental and technologically-oriented problems at the interface between the quantum and classical aspects of light and its interaction with matter. The project brought together complementary areas of condensed-matter physics to address currently open problems in nano- and quantum-optics. My contribution to the project consisted in the study of the nonreciprocal coupling between quantum emitters with an application to plasmons [1].

[1] C. A. Downing et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 057401 (2019).

Squirrel

SQUIRREL (acronym for Sensing Quantum Information coRRELations) was the Marie Curie (IEF-Fellowship for career development) of Dr Elena del Valle, my other PhD director. The goal of the project was to extend the knowledge that the correlations among photons change when detection is taken into account [1]. My contribution to the project was twofold: I provided the complete landscape of correlations of the photons emitted by a two-level system in the Mollow triplet regime [2], and showed that one can engineer a source of single photons with a linewidth narrower than the natural linewidth of the emitter [3].

[1] A. González-Tudela et al., New J. Phys. 15, 033036 (2013).
[2] J. C. López Carreño et al., Laser Photon. Rev. 11, 1700090 (2017).
[3] J. C. López Carreño et al., Quantum Sci. Technol. 3, 045001 (2018).

PolaFlow

PolaFlow was a European funded network (ERC-2012) based in Lecce (Italy) under the supervision of Dr Daniele Sanvitto, Dr Pavlos Savvidis and Prof Dr Fabrice Laussy, one of my two PhD directors. The network studied the physics of microcavity polaritons, and I was directly involved in providing the essential theoretical support to the experimental efforts made in Lecce. The project was divided in two by the paradigms of excitation of the polaritons: while in the first part, where the driving was done with laser (without quantum correlations) and to which I also contributed [1], my largest input was done in the quantum regime of excitation: I proposed an experiment consisting on the excitation exploiting the quantum correlations of the light emitted by a two-level system [2], but its implementation was too challenging. Instead, we made an experiment exciting the polaritons with pairs of entangled photons, thus realizing for the first time the quantization of the polariton field and showing that they are able to maintain quantum correlations [3].

[1] L. Dominici et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 226401 (2014).
[2] J. C. López Carreño et al. , Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 196402 (2015).
[3] Á. Cuevas, J. C. López Carreño et al. , Science Advances 4, eaao6814 (2018).