Published: May 29, 2019

Juliet Gopinath

Juliet Gopinath

Faculty Spotlight

Juliet Gopinath:听Associate Director, CUbit Quantum Initiative; Associate Professor of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science; Associate Professor of Physics; Fellow, Materials Science and Engineering

Juliet Gopinath joined CU Boulder鈥檚 College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) in 2009. Prior to taking the role of associate director of the CUbit Quantum Initiative, Gopinath led a collaborative quantum research effort within CEAS, making valuable connections between departments at the college, university level partners and outside institutions.

Gopinath is currently part of two collaborative seed grants that were awarded through CUbit to foster work and partnerships in quantum information science. One examines methods to make entangled frequency combs in a compact and tunable manner, while the other focuses on generating truly random numbers in a small form factor.听

Research interests and Gopinath鈥檚 Optics and Photonics Research Group

Gopinath leads an experimentally focused optics group centered around lasers and optical devices. Current research projects include adaptive optics, mid-infrared lasers and materials, the generation and detection of orbital angular momentum of light, spectroscopy of materials, Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) systems, and pulsed and continuous wave sources in spectral regions where lasers suffer from fundamental physical constraints.听

Applications of the technology include sensors, communications, LIDAR, medical imaging and surgery, environmental monitoring and quantum information science. The group鈥檚 research is interdisciplinary, spanning electrical engineering, physics and materials science.

Education

Gopinath earned her bachelor鈥檚 degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, and her master鈥檚 degree and doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Quotable and notable

Gopinath is the principal investigator on a $1 million multi-university, multi-disciplinary National Science Foundation project that seeks to foster collaboration in quantum research. The proposal focuses on the ability to share information through photonic integrated circuits, which encode information on light, rather than electricity. It aims to create a single photonic integrated circuit chip for quantum information processing. Such a chip would allow secure quantum networking and quantum computing, replacing the binary zeros and ones of conventional computing with multivariable quantum bits. Practical applications include significantly improved data encryption for personal privacy.

鈥淛uliet is bringing together engineering and science to help reinforce CU Boulder as a major hub in quantum,鈥 said Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation Terri Fiez. 鈥淭he CUbit Quantum Initiative underscores the collaboration between our engineers and scientists that is so critical in translating fundamental quantum discoveries into transformative applications.鈥澨