ECE graduate student and Dallesasse win Andrew Yang Research and Entrepreneurship Award

ECE ILLINOIS graduate student John Anthony Carlson, II and ECE ILLINOIS Professor John Dallesasse recently won the Andrew Yang Research and Entrepreneurship Award for the 2019-2020 year. They were awarded for their idea based on enabling solid-state quantum information storage and retrieval by optical processes.

Their research brought together photonics, ferromagnetics, and quantum information while promoting the College and Department's mission of furthering quantum science. Their idea combined advances in nonlinear optics, dilute magnetic semiconductors, optics-based quantum coherent control, and other advances in material science using gallium nitride (GaN).

"What this fellowship means is access," said Carlson. "I think all graduate students appreciate the access they get to new tools and new knowledge during their time in academia, but to then be given the access and the financial means to carry out an original idea and to bring it to a potentially marketable form is truly something else. That kind of access is not guaranteed in life and so I hope I can do the funders proud and make the opportunity count."

The researchers intend to design a memory structure for qubit signals, one that can leverage established gallium nitride fabrication technologies and the optical telecommunication infrastructure. We hope this can answer one of the bottlenecks in realizing a scalable quantum information network.

This is the first endeavor into quantum information technologies (i.e. quantum computing) by the Dallesasse Group. The goal is a scalable design for quantum information memory systems that leverage available silicon/III-V semiconductor fabrication technologies as well as optical telecommunication networks.

"I thank my advisor, Professor John Dallesasse, for guiding the idea from its nascence and teaching me most everything I know," said Carlson. 

"I also thank Professor Scott Carney (now at Rochester Univ.), who first encouraged me to pursue my idea when I took his ECE 570 Nonlinear Optics class in Fall 2015. Without the two of them, I suppose I wouldn’t be interviewed here and now. And of course, I thank my friends who heard me out and helped edit my idea down to a succinct proposal."

Dallesasse is also affiliated with the MNTL.