Subsidiary Spotlight: Freedom Photonics 

As QCi expands, we’d like to highlight some of the amazing companies that are joining us in our goal to bring accessible quantum technology to the world. Today, we’re talking about a well-respected supplier of photonics devices and sub systems: Freedom Photonics. 

Freedom was founded in 2005 by a group of University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) grad students who saw a gap in the market for tunable and high-power semiconductor lasers.  Over twenty years later, they’ve become a trusted supplier to government agencies and prime contractors, as well as to commercial customers, who need to design advanced systems. This has given them not only name recognition as a producer of high-performance products, but also a broad repertoire of process development expertise. 

In acquiring Freedom, QCi gains not only a team with decades of experience making photonic components, such as lasers, detectors, and photonic integrated circuits (PICs), but also experience solving complex packaging problems. One area of expertise has been to take customers' proof of concept systems, frequently in the form of a large optical table consisting of off the shelf optical components and miniaturizing them into something compact and robust, creating the kinds of systems that can bring laboratory quantum and optical science, such as sensing, into the field. 

Freedom Photonics is developing processes to integrate their existing products with QCi’s thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) nonlinear optical components and package them to preserve quantum information. This promises to enable QCi to improve performance, lower costs, and reduce the footprint of products. 

Freedom Photonics will be at the QCi booth at SPIE Optics and Photonics next week, highlighting their fast random-access tunable lasers.  

This laser, designed to operate common telecom wavelengths as well as test and measurement spectrums, can be moved by tens of nanometers in wavelength, allowing operators to access a broad range of the spectrum compared to traditional lasers. Not only does it have superior tuning range, but it can switch wavelengths in as little as two microseconds while maintaining picometer stability and accuracy. It is a breakthrough in compact, tunable laser technology that has applications to many fields of sensing, such as gas analysis and interferometry.  

Come visit QCi and see the technology enabled by our subsidiary Freedom Photonics at Booth # 540 at SPIE Optics &Photonics, next week from August 25-27 in San Diego, CA.