Welcome to the Hood Lab at Purdue!

Our goal is to understand and control the interactions between light and quantum emitters.

We work with two platforms: single atoms held in optical tweezers, and single organic molecules cooled inside a crystal. In both, we are working toward better quantum control of the emitters.

With the atoms, trapped in arrays of optical tweezers, we have worked on understanding cooling in lithium and cesium and on characterizing a narrow line in cesium. We are now working on efficient ways to collect the light they emit, on studying collective effects, and on building toward a nanophotonic interface.

With the molecules, we have introduced new ways of integrating emitters with integrated photonics. We are working toward two things: generating highly pure photons that can be used for entanglement distribution, and studying the fundamental collective interactions between emitters, including how they can be used to generate multi-photon states, how to characterize those states, and what they are useful for in quantum information science. We are now extending these same questions to colloidal quantum dots, a second chemically synthesized emitter, where our first paper is on its way.