In this talk we will discuss how to engineer the dispersion relation of photonic platforms to provide robust propagation of classical and quantum states of light.

In the first part of this talk, we will unveil how to leverage the interaction of nonlinearity with higher orders of dispersion to create novel types of solitons, wave packets that propagate unperturbed for long distances. These objects have advantageous energy-width scaling laws with respect to conventional nonlinear Schrodinger solitons and show promise for applications in ultrafast lasers and integrated frequency combs.

Subsequently, we will cover recent developments in topological quantum photonics. Topological photonics studies topological phases of light and leverages the appearance of robust topological edge states.  We will emphasize our experimental demonstration of nonlinearly generated and topologically protected photon pairs and path-entangled biphoton states in silicon waveguide arrays. Further, we will detail our latest experiments demonstrating entanglement between topologically distinct modes, highlighting topology as an entanglement degree of freedom.