BBQ Lab

We are currently advertising a new postdoc position in our group. If you are interested in joining us, please look at our Openings page for more information. This position will be open for applications until the 31st of July, 2022.

Alternately, you can apply directly at the Heriot-Watt University jobs website.

In our new paper titled Quantum researcher mobility: the wonderful wizard of Oz who paid for Dorothy’s visa fees, published in the IOP journal Quantum Science and Technology, we discuss the many hurdles facing international researcher mobility today. We tackle issues such as exorbitant visa fees, short-term contracts, and cultural hurdles to mobility. Most importantly, we discuss many examples of good practice from around the world and propose possible solutions to overcome such hurdles. This work was done in collaboration with Eliza Agudelo from TU Vienna and Ravi Kunjwal from Université libre de Bruxelles.

Natalia and Mehul recently represented BBQLab at the 6th International Conference on Optical Angular Momentum in Tampere, Finland. It was a fantastic event, bringing together a diverse group of researchers from around the world working on structured photons, electrons, ions, and neutrons! Natalia won the second prize in the hotly contested ICOAM poster competition for her submission on entangled ripples and twists of light. Mehul presented an invited talk on our recent work on programming high-dimensional quantum optical circuits inside a complex medium. We are looking forward to ICOAM2024 in South Africa!

BBQLab descended on Bristol for Bristol Quantum Information Technologies Workshop 2022 to enjoy a fantastic week of seminars, poster sessions, networking events and engagement with the scientific community – and beautiful Bristol.

Congratulations to Vatshal Srivastav (left) and Suraj Goel (right) for winning the People’s Choice Poster Prize, gaining over 50% of peoples votes! Brilliant follow-up to Vatshal’s win in BQIT: 2021.

As well as an inspiring Equality, Diveristy and Inclusion session featuring our group leader Prof Mehul Malik, and co-chaired by our Sophie Engineer.

All in all, a wonderful opportunity for all nine of our team to step out of the virtual and into real life. Bring on more conferences, workshops and prizes!

In a recent paper on the arXiv, we show how high-dimensional quantum optical circuits can be programmed inside a commercial multi-mode fibre through the use of inverse-design techniques. Using these methods, we were able to demonstrate the transport, manipulation, and measurement of high-dimensional photonic entanglement by using the transmission channel itself!

We also present numerical results on the scalability of our approach, showing how the resource of a high-dimensional mode-mixer allows perfect and lossless circuits to be realised in principle. By harnessing something as simple as light scattering inside a multi-mode fibre, our work serves as a new, yet practical alternative to integrated photonic platforms.

This work was done in collaboration with our QuantERA project partners Claudio Conti (La Sapienza, Rome) and Pepijn Pinkse (Uni Twente, Netherlands). We look forward to many more exciting collaborations in the future!