New JQI Fellow Harnesses Light For Emerging Quantum Tech

Avik Dutt, JQI’s newest Fellow, has his feet planted in two neighboring academic fields: physics and engineering. By bridging the two complementary fields, he pursues projects that both explore new fundamental science and develop devices for practical applications. Dutt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at UMD, and he leads a lab focused on both studying the quantum physics of light and developing devices, like quantum sensors, that use the quantum properties of light to exceed the capabilities of existing technologies. Dutt has been straddling physics and engineering since he was an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, near his hometown. There, he majored in electronics and electrical communication engineering with a minor in physics. In addition to his classes, he worked with a couple of his professors on theory and simulations for research projects in photonics—the field of producing, manipulating and studying individual particles of light called photons. The topic caught his attention so much that he pursued it as a graduate student. For his doctoral work, he worked under Michal Lipson, first at Cornell University and later at Columbia University when she…