Building the perfect quantum camera

Sarah Odinotski inside the Cleanroom Laboratory wearing full protective gear
Sarah Odinotski inside the Cleanroom Laboratory wearing full protective gear

Imagine a camera that doesn’t miss anything, one sensitive enough to detect individual photons of light. That ’ s the goal of Sarah Odinotski k DeGooyer , two PhD researchers from the Institute Quantum Computing and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The potential of their ambitious project was underlined when both were awarded prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate olarships for their distinct but complementary research. 

Odinotski is part of the Quantum Photonic Devices Laboratory team, led by Michael Reimer. Her work focuses on designing sensors capable of detecting single photons, the smallest unit of light. By designing intricately patterned "metamaterials," Odinotski aims to capture individual photons convert them into detectable electronic signals.  

"If you throw a snowball off the side of a cliff, it’ll start rolling and will c te an avalanche," she explains. "The structures within our metamaterial are capable of efficiently generating one electron from the single absorbed photon. It can then take that electron and multiply it into millions of electrons to c te an ’avalanche’ of current."

Working in the same laboratory, deGooyer hopes to build a fully functioning camera made up of these precise sensors. To achieve this, he is developing microcircuits that can process and monitor the weak signals generated by the sensors. "What I’m doing is making scales the width of a human hair," deGooyer says. "The scales count electrons as they’re passing by." This process is key to scaling up individual sensors into a system that can generate detailed images with near-perfect sensitivity.

From quantum computing to astronomy, t’he applications of this technology are incredibly diverse and consequential. One of the team’s motivations is to use their cameras for medical imaging. They hope their system will allow more accurate detection of cancerous cells for faster diagnosis and t tment.

The exciting possibilities of this technology were recognized by the two Vanier awards , which highlight the value of collaboration across research disciplines to enable new discoveries. "It’s an affirmation of the research and the different philosophies that both Sarah and I bring to the project," d’eGooyer says.

See inside Waterloo’s Clean r oom and quantum lab where students are designing sensors capable of detecting single photons

Jack Weatherston