PhD candidate Milica Banic is the 2022 recipient of the Xanadu Award for an Outstanding Publication by a PhD Student.
With support from Xanadu, the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Department of Physics have established this $5,000 scholarship, which is awarded to one or more PhD students in the Department of Physics in recognition of the publication of a peer-reviewed article in an academic journal on a topic related to quantum information and quantum optics.
This award is the result of a donation of $25,000 over five years from Xanadu, a Toronto-based start-up company with close ties to the Department of Physics. A number of former post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and undergraduate students are affiliated with Xanadu and Xanadu continues to work with U of T Physics faculty through the MITACS Program
Due to their current and past relationships with the University of Toronto, Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook says “we wanted to encourage students in the field of quantum information and quantum optics and to let them know that Xanadu, and many other quantum startups in Canada, exist when they graduate.”
Application requirements include a peer-reviewed article on a topic related to quantum information and quantum optics and a cover letter explaining the significance of the paper in one or two paragraphs.
Milica Banic was selected by the Xanadu Award Committee of the Department of Physics in winter 2022. She received the award for her paper "Generation of photon pairs by stimulated emission in ring resonators".
Milica describes the paper - "We study the generation of photon pairs by a nonlinear process called stimulated third order parametric down-conversion (TOPDC). We discuss some differences between this pair generation scheme and others which are commonly employed, and by calculating its efficiency in a microring resonator, we argue that it should soon be possible to demonstrate this process in integrated photonic devices."
When asked what this award means to her she says "Our hope is that publishing this work will lead to interest from the community in integrated TOPDC, which has not been seriously discussed in the literature. I especially hope to see efforts towards the design of platforms for TOPDC. Progress in this area could eventually make other TOPDC processes viable, which would open the possibility of generating different types of non-classical light for use in larger systems. I see this award as a sign that this work could indeed have the impact that we envision, which is very encouraging."
Read the award winning paper here:
https://opg.optica.org/ol/fulltext.cfm?uri=ol-47-7-1802&id=470891
More on Xanadu:
https://whatsyourtech.ca/2020/10/12/all-you-need-is-quantum-cloud-from-canadian-tech-startup-xanadu/