Biography
Nick earned his Ph.D in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on enhancing light-emission using nanophotonic structures, developing proposals to enable new emission pathways using nanophotonic systems such as plasmons and polaritons. He also developed a technique to enhance scintillators using nanophotonic structures such as photonic crystals. He then moved to Harvard University for his postdoc, where he worked on techniques to understand and control quantum noise dynamics in multimode nonlinear optical systems in systems with bulk and few-photon nonlinearities. His research has been recognized with awards such as the LeRoy Apker Award of the American Physical Society, a Junior Fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the Andrew Lockett Memorial Fund Thesis award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Tingye Li Innovation Prize from Optica.
Research Interests
- Optical Physics
- Condensed Matter and Material Physics
- Nanotechnology
- Quantum Information Science
Quantum optics rules over the statistical properties of light, and specifically, enforces fundamental limits on the signal-to-noise ratio in a wide range of measurements that employ light. By taming quantum noise, many important applications can be realized in microscopy, imaging, and other experiments limited by signal-to-noise. A high-profile example is gravitational wave detection, where “squeezed states” of light, with reduced noise, have been used to lower the noise floor of an interferometer designed to detect gravitational waves. Our group is currently working broadly on three main directions: (1) realizing quantum states of light in new settings (e.g., on-chip, at new wavelengths, at ultrahigh intensities, and with spatiotemporal entanglement), (2) developing new applications of quantum light, and (3) developing new platforms for nonlinear optics (e.g., multimode optical fibers, integrated nanophotonic waveguides, and driven material systems such as phonons).
Select Publications
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Shiekh Zia Uddin, Nicholas Rivera, Devin Seyler, Yannick Salamin, Jamison Sloan, Charles Roques-Carmes, Shutao Xu, Michelle Sander, and Marin Soljačić. “Noise-immune quantum correlations of intense light.” Nature Photonics (2025).
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Nicholas Rivera, Jamison Sloan, Yannick Salamin, John D. Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić. “Creating large Fock states and massively squeezed states in optics using systems with nonlinear bound states in the continuum,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
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Charles Roques-Carmes, Nicholas Rivera, Ali Ghorashi, Steven Kooi, Yi Yang, Zin Lin, Justin Beroz, Nicolas Romeo, John D., Joannopoulos, Ido Kaminer, Steven G. Johnson, and Marin Soljačić. “A general framework for scintillation in nanophotonics,” Science (2022).
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Nicholas Rivera and Ido Kaminer. “Light-matter interactions with photonic quasiparticles,” Nature Reviews Physics (2020).
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Nicholas Rivera, Liang Jie Wong, John D. Joannopoulos, Marin Soljačić, and Ido Kaminer, “Light emission based on nanophotonic vacuum forces,” Nature Physics (2019).
Select Awards and Honors
- Tingye Li Innovation Prize, Optica 2024
- Andrew M. Lockett III Memorial Fund Award, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2022
- Junior Fellowship, Harvard Society of Fellows 2021
- LeRoy Apker Award, Americal Physical Society 2016
Education
- Ph.D. in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022 2022
- Bachelor of Science in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2016