Marc Dignam

Bio

Dr. Marc Dignam is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and leads a theory group studying quantum and nonlinear optics. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories under Nobel Laureate Horst Stormer. He develops theoretical and computational models of nonlinear and quantum optics in semiconductor nanostructures and photonic crystals, which he has tested and refined through collaboration with experimental groups around the world. He was a recipient of a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and was a co-PI on an NSERC Strategic Project grant on “High-field Terahertz Characterization of Transport Phenomena in Graphene and Semiconductor Nanostructures” developing theoretical and computational models of the linear and nonlinear terahertz response of semiconductor nanorods and monolayer graphene in collaboration with experimentalists. He has published over 75 journal articles, including 9 Physical Review Letters and 7 Applied Physics Letters. 

Dr. Dignam applies his expertise to themes one quantum and nonlinear optics, for example, by employing his adjoint master equation approach to treat nonlinear quantum optics in photonic crystals and coupled-cavity systems. In particular, he models and designs coupled cavity systems to optimize optical squeezing and photon pair generation and entanglement in cavities, with and without quantum dots. In addition, he employs his excitonic formalism to model the optical properties of excitons in coupled quantum dot system for applications in photon pair generation.

Research Interests

• Quantum optics and cavity QED in ring resonators and photonic crystals
• Nonlinear quantum optics in coupled photonic crystal cavities
• Generation of multimode squeezed states on chip
• The nonlinear response of graphene to intense THz fields
• The effects of impurities, strain and phonons on the linear and nonlinear response of 2D materials

Publications