SIPQNP 2026
Program Booklet
Dates: February 19-20, 2026
Location: MIT Campus, Cambridge MA
Sponsored by: NSF Center for Quantum Networks
Program Committee
- Ryan Camacho, Brigham Young University
- Matt Shaw, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Zheshen Zhang, University of Michigan
- Daniel Soh, University of Arizona
- Kanu Sinha, University of Arizona
- Brian Smith, University of Oregon
- Mohammad Hafezi, University of Maryland
- Saikat Guha, University of Maryland
| Topics for SIPQNP 2026 half-day sessions (full agenda TBD soon!) | PC members in charge |
| Topic 1 [Thursday AM]. Artificial intelligence in quantum photonics: Use of AI techniques in the photonic domain for classical and/or quantum light for better sensitivity, energy consumption or speed of operation, development of associated ML algorithms in the optical domain and device needs to realize them; and applications. | Zheshen, Daniel |
| Topic 2 [Thursday PM]. Scalable quantum interconnects: Different approaches, devices and systems for interconnecting heterogenous and homogenous quantum memories and processors, such as Waveguide QED, ZALM-based photon-pair source, non-linear quantum frequency conversion, time lensing, pump engineering for nonlinear pulse compression, and more; and applications. | Brian, Kanu |
| Topic 3. [Friday AM]. Spatial and temporal mode transformations: Linear, nonlinear and quantum multi-mode processing across spatial and/or temporal / spectral modes of quantum and/or classical light; and applications. | Saikat, Mohammad |
| Topic 4. [Friday PM]. Cryogenic platforms and packaging: Packaging technologies for quantum photonics, including compact cryogenic components, e.g., to support space-flight cryogenics for astrophysics, such as single-photon detectors and atomic quantum memories with photonic interfaces; devices, materials, and full system integration; and applications. | Ryan, Matt |
PROGRAM
| Day 0 (Wednesday, February 18) | |||
| Time | Session | Speaker | Location |
| 6:00pm – 8:00pm | Reception | Nicole Yunger Halpern | Catalyst – 300 Technology Square, Cambridge |
| Day 1 (Thursday, February 19) | |||
| Time | Session | Speaker | Location |
| 8:00am – 8:30am | Breakfast and registration | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | |
| 8:30am – 8:45am | Opening remarks | Saikat Guha | |
| Topic 1 – machine learning with quantum and photonic systems | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | ||
| 8:45am-9:00am | (1) Entanglement enhanced learning | Liang Jiang | |
| 9:00am – 9:15am | (2) Quantum nonlinearity for optical neural computing | Qingyi Zhou | |
| 9:15am – 9:30am | (3) Variational quantum circuit machine learning | Junyu Liu | |
| 9:30am – 9:45am | (4) Quantum state readout | Zheshen Zhang | |
| 9:45am – 10:00am | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 10:00am – 10:30am | (5) Deep Neural Network | Tianyu Wang | |
| 10:30am – 10:45am | (6) Reservoir computing | Hakan Tureci | |
| 10:45am – 11:00am | (7) Minimalistic low-energy-consuming quantum machine learning | Daniel Soh | |
| 11:00am – 11:15am | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 11:15am – noon | Moderated Panel Discussion (moderator – Daniel Soh) | Nick Harris/Darius Bunandar Quntao Zhuang Jungsang Kim Bo-Han Wu Zheshen Zhang Zach Vernon | |
| noon – 1pm | LUNCH (1 hour) | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | |
| Topic 2 – Architectures and approaches for scalable interconnects | |||
| Flash Talks 1: Architectures and approaches for scalable interconnects | |||
| 1pm – 1:10pm | (1) Trapped-ion modular architectures | Chris Monroe | |
| 1:10pm – 1:20pm | (2) Spin-photon interfaces and photonic cluster states | Emily Van Milligen | |
| 1:20pm – 1:30pm | (3) Photonic cluster state generation | Shuo Sun | |
| 1:30pm – 1:40pm | (4) Architectures for repeaters, memories, buffers | Dirk Englund | |
| 1:40pm – 1:50pm | (5) Distributed Quantum Processing with Waveguide Coupled Emitters | Prajit Dhara | |
| 1:50pm – 2:00pm | (6) Integrated photonic quantum technologies | Hadiseh Alaeian | |
| 2:00pm – 2:10pm | BREAK (10 mins) | ||
| Flash Talks 2: Hardware level issues: Platform specific challenges in quantum interconnects, and the role of photonics | |||
| 2:10pm – 2:20pm | (1) Neutral atom quantum processors | Aziza Suleymanzade | |
| 2:20pm – 2:30pm | (2) Trapped ions | Sara Mouradian | |
| 2:30pm – 2:40pm | (3) Superconducting qubits | Aziza Almankaly | |
| 2:40pm – 2:50pm | (4) Programmable temporal mode conversion for connecting hybrid optically-active memories | Francesca Sansavini | |
| 2:50pm – 3:00pm | (5) Quantum dots | Edo Waks | |
| 3:00pm – 3:15pm | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 3:15pm – 4:00pm | Moderated Panel Discussion (co-moderators – Kanu Sinha and Brian Smith) Hybrid quantum systems: Circuit QED, solid-state spins and silicon photonics — Sherry Hybrid quantum systems/quantum interconnects: Cold atoms and Circuit QED — Joyce Ion trap processors, and cavity-coupled ions — Bob Quantum network architectures — Don Trapped ion architectures — Norbert Multiplexed color center processors — Chao | Sherry Zhang Joyce Jiang Bob Niffinegger Don Towsley Norbert Linke Chao Li | |
| Day 2 (Friday, February 20) | |||
| Time | Session | Speaker | Location |
| 7:30 AM | Breakfast served | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | |
| Topic 3 – Spatial and temporal mode transformations | |||
Flash talks 1: Use cases for scalable mode transformations | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | ||
| 8:00am – 8:10am | (1) Super-resolution imaging | Saikat Guha | |
| 8:10am – 8:20am | (2) Photonic sensing and AI | Quntao Zhuang | |
| 8:20am – 8:30am | (3) Photonic cluster state preparation | Olivier Pfister | |
| 8:30am – 8:40am | (4) Trapped ion quantum phononics | Jungsang Kim | |
| 8:40am – 8:50am | (5) Opto-mechanical imaging | Dal Wilson | |
| 8:50am – 9:00am | (6) Neutral atom excitation | Aziza Suleymanzade | |
| 9:00am – 9:15am | (7) Application Perspective on Mode Transformations | Janis Nötzel | |
| 9:15am – 9:30am | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
Flash talks 2: Hardware platforms and enabling technologies | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | ||
| 9:30am – 9:40am | (1) Time-delayed interferometry | Chaohan Cui | |
| 9:40am – 9:50am | (2) OAM fibers for high-dimensional entanglement generation | Siddharth Ramachandran | |
| 9:50am – 10:00am | (3) Spatial multi-plane light conversion | Christine Wang | |
| 10:00am – 10:10am | (4) Engineered meta materials and meta surfaces | Mahmoud Jalali | |
| 10:10am – 10:20am | (5) Temporal-spectral-mode “multi-plane” methods | Linran Fan | |
| 10:20am – 10:30am | Open Mic — impromptu talks | ||
| 10:30am – 10:45am | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 10:45am – 11:30am | Moderated Panel Discussion (co-moderators – Saikat Guha and Mohammad Hafezi) imaging use cases — Sergey entanglement assisted sensing use cases — Alexey manipulating squeezed light — Avik configurable linear optics for cluster states — Sophia Microwave photonics use cases — Sherry EIT and precision metrology use cases — Irina | Sergey Polyakov Alexey Gorshkov Avik Dutt Sherry Zhang Irina Novikova | |
| 11:30 – 12pm | LUNCH (30 mins) | Haus-Allen Room, Building 36 Floor 4, MIT | |
| Topic 4 – Crygenic platforms and packaging | |||
| noon – 12:10 | Introduce Session + Challenge Topic: Heterogeneous Temperature Cryogenics | Ryan Camacho | |
| 12:10pm – 12:40pm | Overview Talk — Field of SNSPDs, perspectives on cryogenics and challenge | Matt Shaw | |
| 12:40pm – 1:10pm | Overview Talk — Cryogenic packaging for quantum memories | Kamil Gradkowski | |
| 1:10pm – 1:25pm | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 1:25pm – 2:25pm | Flash Talks (15 minutes each) | ||
| (1) Photonic Packaging of Cryogenic Interconnects | Ben Dixon | ||
| (2) Quantinuum Perspective | Zach Vernon | ||
| (3) Space Cryogenics | Mike Dipirro | ||
| (4) Superconducting Electronics | Karl Berggren | ||
| 2:25pm – 2:40pm | BREAK (15 mins) | ||
| 2:40pm – 3:30pm | Moderated Discussion Challenge Topic: Heterogeneous Temperature Cryogenics (co-moderators: Ryan Camacho and Matt Shaw) | ||
| 3:30 PM | ADJOURN / Closing Remarks | Saikat Guha | |
PARTICIPANTS
| Name | Institution |
| Alexey Gorshkov | NIST |
| Allyson O’Brien | DARPA |
| Avik Dutt | UMD |
| Aziza Almankaly | MIT/NYU |
| Aziza Suleymanzade | UC Berkeley |
| Babak Saif | NASA |
| Ben Dixon | MIT-LL |
| Bob Niffenegger | UMass Amherst |
| Bo-Han Wu | Univ. Hawaii |
| Brian Smith | UOregon |
| Chao Li | MIT |
| Chaohan Cui | UMD |
| Chris Monroe | Duke |
| Christian Arenz | ASU |
| Christine Wang | Diffraqtion |
| Dalziel Wilson | UArizona |
| Dan Kilper | Trinity College |
| Daniel Blumenthal | UCSB |
| Daniel Soh | UArizona |
| Darius Bunandar | Lightmatter |
| Dirk Englund | MIT |
| Don Boroson | MIT-LL |
| Don Towsley | UMass Amherst |
| Ed Barnes | VTech |
| Edo Waks | UMD |
| Emily Van Milligen | VTech |
| Federico Capasso | Harvard |
| Filip Rozpedek | UMass Amherst |
| Francesca Sansavini | University of Oregon |
| Franco Wong | MIT |
| Gayane Vardoyan | UMass Amherst |
| Hadiseh Alaeian | Purdue |
| Hakan Tureci | Princeton U. |
| Irina Novikova | WM |
| Janis Noetzel | TUM |
| John Jarman | Nu Quantum |
| Joyce Jiang | UPitt |
| Jungsang Kim | Duke |
| Junyu Liu | UPitt |
| Justin Cohen | DARPA |
| Kamil Gradkowski | Tyndall National Institute |
| Kanu Sinha | UArizona |
| Karl Berggren | MIT |
| Kerolos Yousef | Harvard University |
| Laura Andre | Qunett |
| Liang Jiang | U Chicago |
| Linran Fan | UT Austin |
| Mahmoud Jalali Mehrabad | MIT |
| Matt Shaw | JPL |
| Mehdi Namazi | Qunnect |
| Mike Dipirro | NASA Goddard |
| Mo Soltani | RTX BBN |
| Mohammad Hafezi | UMD |
| Nicole Yunger Halpern | UMD |
| Nick Harris | Lightmatter |
| Norbert Linke | UMD |
| Oliver Slattery | NIST |
| Olivier Pfister | UVa |
| Prajit Dhara | RTX BBN |
| Prithwish Basu | RTX BBN |
| Quntao Zhuang | USC |
| Rajveer Nehra | UMass Amherst |
| Robert Niffenegger | UMass Amherst |
| Ryan Camacho | BYU |
| Saikat Guha | UMD |
| Sara Mouradian | UWashington |
| Sergey Polyakov | NIST |
| Shuo Sun | UColorado |
| Siddharth Ramachandran | BU |
| Sophia Economou | VTech |
| Stefan Krastanov | UMass Amherst |
| Tianyu Wang | Boston U |
| Xueyue (Sherry) Zhang | ColumbiaU |
| Zac Dutton | RTX BBN |
| Zachary Vernon | Quantinuum |
| Zheshen Zhang | UMich Ann Arbor |
| Zhujun Shi | University of Pittsburgh |
| Zongfu Yu | Univ. Wisconsin-Madison |
| postdocs and students | |
| Stav Haldar | UMass Amherst |
| Emily Van Milligen | Virginia Tech |
| Yuxin Wang | UMD |
| Lorcan Conlon | UMD |
| Wenhua He | UMD |
| Jack Postlewaite | UMD |
| Gabe Richardson | UMD |
| Isack Padilla | UArizona |
| Francesca Sansavini | UOregon |
| Joohyung Song | UMD |
| Kerolos Yousef | Harvard |
| Phrahlad Iyengar | MIT |
| James Kwon | UMD |
| Qingyi Zhou | UWisc |
| Evan Anderson | UArizona |