Biography
Sarah Thomas joined the department in January 2025 as an Associate Professor and a Tutorial Fellow at Balliol College. Her research focuses on photonic quantum technologies and the development of devices for quantum networks. Sarah completed her PhD in the physics department in Oxford, focusing on the development of optical quantum memories, which are key devices for the scalability of optical quantum technologies.
Sarah was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Paris, working on quantum dot based single-photon sources and their applications in photonic quantum technologies. In 2022 Sarah was awarded an Imperial College Research Fellowship and worked on interfacing quantum dot single photon sources with atomic quantum memories for applications in future quantum networks.
Research Interests
Sarah's research focuses on the development of devices for quantum networks. The future of quantum technologies is likely to be based on quantum networks, which enable secure long-distance quantum communication, and allow smaller quantum processing units to be connected to create powerful quantum computing systems. A key component of future quantum networks is a quantum memory – a device that enables on-demand storage and retrieval of quantum states of light.
Quantum memories are necessary for entanglement distribution across large-scale quantum networks and for synchronizing probabilistic operations for photonic quantum computation.Sarah's research focuses on the development and optimisation of quantum memories using light-matter interactions in atomic systems.
Current Projects
- "Enhanced Quantum Dot Sources and Optical Atomic Memories for Telecommunication InterConnectivity" (EQSOTIC), EU QuantERA
- "High Performance Time, Frequency and Spatial Multiplexing for scalable networking", Innovate UK
- "Integrated Quantum Networks", EPSRC Quantum Hub
