Raphaël Van Laer

Raphaël Van Laer leads an interdisciplinary research team in photonics and quantum technologies at Chalmers University of Technology. He explores the flow of and interactions between light, sound, and microwaves for coherent classical and quantum information processing.

He received a PhD in silicon photonics at Ghent University-imec, making contributions to integrated nonlinear optics and optomechanics. The results were recognized with an IEEE Graduate Student Scholarship and a VOCATIO award. Afterwards he worked mainly on thin-film lithium niobate, heterogeneous photonic integration, and quantum microwave-to-optics conversion as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. His team at Chalmers is supported by the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology and by the European Research Council with a Starting Grant.

His research revolves around two overarching questions. First, what are the physical limits to information processing in a constrained space? Second, can we realize large-scale coherent communication, sensing, and computation?