Quantum resources such as squeezed and entangled states of light provide a pathway to surpass classical sensitivity limits in measurement and information processing. This thesis presents the development and application of engineered squeezed light sources across both bulk and integrated photonic platforms, demonstrating their utility in advancing quantum-enhanced metrology for spectroscopy and inertial sensing. In the first experimental platform, I introduce entangled dual-comb spectroscopy (EDCS), which integrates squeezed light with dual-comb architectures. By exploiting entanglement across comb lines, EDCS circumvents the shot-noise limitations of classical dual-comb spectroscopy. My experiment demonstrate a 2.6 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio and a 1.7-fold reduction in integration time, establishing EDCS as a powerful tool for rapid and precise chemical and biological sensing. The second platform applies squeezed light to resonant fiber optic gyroscopes (RFOGs), where quantum fluctuations typically impose a fundamental noise floor. By injecting bright amplitude-squeezed light into the resonator, I achieve a 2 dB reduction in detector noise, verified via Allan deviation analysis. This quantum-enhanced RFOG architecture shows that squeezed light can improve sensitivity under practical operational conditions, paving the way for next-generation inertial navigation systems. Finally, I demonstrate the on-chip generation of squeezed light using silicon nitride photonic circuits. Thin-film devices achieve more than 2 dB of quadrature squeezing with excellent agreement between experiment and theory, while wafer-scale thick-film devices yield reproducible 3 dB squeezing across multiple dies with sub-0.2 dB variation. These results establish silicon nitride as a CMOS-compatible platform for scalable and manufacturable quantum light sources, offering a route toward robust, large-scale quantum photonic technologies. Together, these results bridge the gap between laboratory demonstrations and deployable quantum-enhanced measurement systems. By advancing both free-space and integrated implementations of squeezed light, this work provides foundational steps toward practical quantum technologies for precision navigation, spectroscopy, and information processing.
Quantum resources such as squeezed and entangled states of light provide a pathway to surpass classical sensitivity limits in measurement and information processing. This thesis presents the development and application of engineered squeezed light sources across both bulk and integrated photonic platforms, demonstrating their utility in advancing quantum-enhanced metrology for spectroscopy and inertial sensing. In the first experimental platform, I introduce entangled dual-comb spectroscopy (EDCS), which integrates squeezed light with dual-comb architectures. By exploiting entanglement across comb lines, EDCS circumvents the shot-noise limitations of classical dual-comb spectroscopy. My experiment demonstrate a 2.6 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio and a 1.7-fold reduction in integration time, establishing EDCS as a powerful tool for rapid and precise chemical and biological sensing. The second platform applies squeezed light to resonant fiber optic gyroscopes (RFOGs), where quantum fluctuations typically impose a fundamental noise floor. By injecting bright amplitude-squeezed light into the resonator, I achieve a 2 dB reduction in detector noise, verified via Allan deviation analysis. This quantum-enhanced RFOG architecture shows that squeezed light can improve sensitivity under practical operational conditions, paving the way for next-generation inertial navigation systems. Finally, I demonstrate the on-chip generation of squeezed light using silicon nitride photonic circuits. Thin-film devices achieve more than 2 dB of quadrature squeezing with excellent agreement between experiment and theory, while wafer-scale thick-film devices yield reproducible 3 dB squeezing across multiple dies with sub-0.2 dB variation. These results establish silicon nitride as a CMOS-compatible platform for scalable and manufacturable quantum light sources, offering a route toward robust, large-scale quantum photonic technologies. Together, these results bridge the gap between laboratory demonstrations and deployable quantum-enhanced measurement systems. By advancing both free-space and integrated implementations of squeezed light, this work provides foundational steps toward practical quantum technologies for precision navigation, spectroscopy, and information processing.
Squeezed-light generation in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is essential for scalable continuous-variable (CV) quantum information processing. By suppressing quantum fluctuations below the shot-noise limit, squeezed states enable quantum-enhanced sensing and serve as a standard resource for CV quantum information processing. While chip-level squeezed-light sources have been demonstrated, extending this capability to the wafer level with reproducible strong squeezing to bolster large-scale quantum-enhanced sensing and information processing has been hindered by squeezed light's extreme susceptibility to device imperfections. Here, we report wafer-scale fabrication, generation, and characterization of two-mode squeezed-vacuum states on a fully complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon nitride (Si3N4) PIC platform. Across a 4-inch wafer, 8 dies yield 2.9-3.1 dB directly measured quadrature squeezing with <0.2 dB variation, demonstrating excellent uniformity. This performance is enabled by co-integrating ultralow-loss, strongly overcoupled high-Q microresonators, cascaded pump-rejection filters, and low-loss inverse-tapered edge couplers. The measurements agree with a first-principles theoretical model parameterized solely by independently extracted device parameters and experimental settings. The measured squeezing level can be further improved by enhancing the efficiencies of off-chip detection and chip-to-fiber coupling. These results establish a reproducible, wafer-scale route to nonclassical-light generation in integrated photonics and lay the groundwork for scalable CV processors, multiplexed entanglement sources, and quantum-enhanced sensing.
Quantum metrology leverages quantum resources to surpass classical limits in measurement sensitivity, enabling new capabilities across fields ranging from fundamental physics to sensing, imaging, and navigation. As these techniques mature, an increasing emphasis is being placed on translating quantum-enhanced performance into practical, robust systems that can operate outside controlled laboratory environments. The overarching objective of the work presented in this dissertation is to develop sensing platforms that achieve improved performance by leveraging quantum resources in realistic, noisy environments. In particular, this work focuses on the use of squeezed states of light, and investigates how two-mode squeezed states generated through four-wave mixing can be developed into compact sources and integrated with practical fiber-optic and plasmonic sensing platforms. Squeezed states of light, and in particular two-mode squeezed states (twin beams), constitute a powerful resource in quantum metrology. Their reduced quantum noise enables measurements below the noise level that can be achieved with classical resources, know as the shot-noise limit, offering genuine quantum advantages in precision sensing and measurement. Beyond their fundamental interest, such states provide a pathway toward practical quantum technologies capable of outperforming classical approaches in real-world applications. For many practical implementations, it is therefore highly advantageous to demonstrate squeezed light sources that are compact, stable, and compatible with existing photonic infrastructures. This is needed to lower the barrier to incorporate quantum resources into experiments and sensing platforms, particularly in environments where bulky or delicate optical setups are impractical. To demonstrate a pathway toward practical quantum sensing with squeezed light, this dissertation presents experimental studies spanning both the development of deployable squeezed-light sources and their application in practical or real-world sensing platforms. We present the development of a compact, narrowband, fiber-coupled source of squeezed light based on four-wave mixing in hot Rb 85 vapor. The system achieves more than 4 dB of intensity-difference squeezing after propagation through polarization-maintaining fibers, demonstrating that strong quantum correlations can be preserved even when fiber coupled. This platform serves as a standalone proof-of-principle demonstration of a deployable, low–size, weight, and power (low-SWaP) squeezed-light source that is well suited for applications where fiber delivery of quantum-correlated light can be readily integrated into existing experimental and sensing platforms. In addition to this source development, the dissertation investigates two distinct applications of twin-beam for quantum-enhanced sensing. The first one focuses on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors, which are widely used to monitor strain, vibration, and temperature in applications ranging from civil infrastructure and aerospace systems to oil and gas pipeline monitoring. By coupling the squeezed light into separate FBGs and employing differential detection, common-mode noise is suppressed while localized perturbations are retained. This work provides a feasibility study for using twin-beams to enhance the sensitivity of FBG-based sensors beyond classical limits while providing robustness against environmental noise. The second application examines plasmonic sensors based on surface plasmon resonances in metallic nanostructures, which enable highly sensitive detection of small changes in refractive index. Such plasmonic sensors are particularly useful for applications in chemical and biological sensing, environmental monitoring, and lab-on-chip platforms, where compactness and high sensitivity to refractive index changes are critical. A dual-probing scheme is introduced in which both beams of a two-mode squeezed state interact with a polarization-dependent plasmonic nanostructure. By exploiting opposite spectral response for orthogonal polarizations, this approach improves measurement sensitivity relative to our previous technique of using one beam to probe the plasmonic sensor and the other to serve as a reference. This new technique takes advantage of transducing information into both the beams while preserving the benefits of differential detection for noise cancellation. Taken together, these studies illustrate complementary approaches for leveraging quantum correlations for practical sensing problems. Through the development of a compact, fiber-compatible squeezed-light source and independent demonstrations of enhanced performance in both fiber-optic and plasmonic sensors, this dissertation advances pathways for translating quantum sensing approaches based on quantum states of light from laboratory demonstrations into deployable metrology tools.
Squeezed light is a fundamental resource for a broad spectrum of quantum technologies, including precision metrology, secure communication, and quantum simulation and computing. The integration of squeezed-light sources with photonic circuits presents a transformative approach—not only offering compactness, stability, and scalability, but also enabling seamless high-fidelity on-chip generation, manipulation, and processing of quantum states without being hampered by inter-component quantum decoherence arising from loss and noise. In this work, we report the experimental generation of a two-mode squeezed vacuum state on a thin-film silicon-nitride photonic integrated circuit with normal group velocity dispersion of 6.3×105 fs2/m. Quadrature squeezing of −2.1 dB±0.09 dB and anti-squeezing of 7.1 dB±0.04 dB are directly measured. To fully understand the dynamics of the quantum process, a comprehensive theoretical model is developed to capture the squeezing performance, showing excellent agreement with experimental results. Our findings highlight the potential of the thin-film silicon nitride platform that capitalizes on fully foundry-compatible fabrication technologies to advance robust, large-scale, and manufacturing-ready quantum information processing systems.
Integration of quantum optical technique on-chip is crucial for large scale applications of quantum technology, which were proven in a free space environment to be superior to the corresponding classical technology. Squeezed states of light can be used for enhancing the sensitivity of quantum sensors and for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Although chip-based squeezed light generation has advanced significantly, practical impact remains limited because coupling losses between the chip and off-chip detectors destroy delicate quantum correlations, restricting the amount of observed squeezing. Here, we overcome this limitation by implementing the idea of on-chip quantum measurement with the aid of a parametric amplifier and applying it to the squeezed state generated by a silicon nitride (SiN) microring resonator. In our scheme, two matched SiN micro-rings are sequentially constructed. The first ring generates a squeezed state, whereas the second ring acts as a high-gain parametric amplifier (PA) that measures the squeezed state before the light experiences significant off-chip loss. This architecture is inherently loss-tolerant: the amplifier elevates the quantum noise well above the vacuum level, making the measurement insensitive to downstream losses. We directly observe a quantum noise reduction of 4.6 dB from the first ring, despite a chip-to-fiber coupling loss exceeding 5 dB. This work also demonstrates the first monolithic SU(1,1) interferometer with an estimated 5 dB signal-to-noise enhancement compared to traditional linear interferometers, and thus establishes a practical pathway for chip-based quantum sensors.
Squeezed light are optical beams with variance below the Shot Noise Level. They are a key resource for quantum technologies based on photons, they can be used to achieve better precision measurements, improve security in quantum key distribution channels and as a fundamental resource for quantum computation. To date, the majority of experiments based on squeezed light have been based on non-linear crystals and discrete optical components, as the integration of quadrature squeezed states of light in a nanofabrication-friendly material is a challenging technological task. Here we measure 0.45 dB of GHz-broad quadrature squeezing produced by a ring resonator integrated on a Silicon Nitride photonic chip that we fabricated with CMOS compatible steps. The result corrected for the off-chip losses is estimated to be 1 dB below the Shot Noise Level. We identify and verify that the current results are limited by excess noise produced in the chip, and propose ways to reduce it. Calculations suggest that an improvement in the optical properties of the chip achievable with existing technology can develop scalable quantum technologies based on light.
Optical frequency combs have emerged as a cornerstone for a wide range of areas, including spectroscopy, ranging, optical clocks, time and frequency transfer, waveform synthesis, and communications. However, quantum-mechanical fluctuations of the optical carrier impose fundamental performance limits on the precision of classical optical frequency combs, particularly in their use for interferometry and spectroscopy. Entanglement, as a quintessential quantum resource, allows for surpassing the fundamental limits of classical systems. Here, we introduce entanglement into the realm of optical frequency combs, formulating entangled dual-comb spectroscopy (EDCS) that surmounts the fundamental limits of classical DCS. EDCS capitalizes on tailored entangled structures across the frequency comb, enabling simultaneous detection of all comb lines below the standard quantum limit of classical DCS. Applying EDCS in gas detection, we achieve a 2.6-dB enhancement in signal-to-noise ratio and a 1.7-fold reduction in integration time over classical DCS, rendering EDCS particularly suited for dynamic chemical and biological sensing, where fast, precise measurements subject to power constraints are required. EDCS opens a new avenue for exploiting quantum frequency combs, underscoring their prospects in a plethora of applications in precision metrology, spectroscopy, and timekeeping.