Taewon Park

PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. I work on quantum and nonlinear photonic chips — turning hard physics into working hardware, from on-chip squeezed-light sources to efficient optical amplifiers.

About

I am a PhD candidate in the Safavi-Naeini Group (LINQS) at Stanford University. The theme of my PhD is making quantum technologies useful — and in particular building the photonics-based quantum hardware that takes quantum and nonlinear optics out of the lab and onto a chip.

I design, nanofabricate, and characterize photonic integrated circuits on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) — the platform reshaping how light is generated, controlled, and measured on a chip. My work spans the full stack: from device physics and simulation, through cleanroom fabrication, to building the optical and electronic experiments that prove a device works. This work spans an on-chip squeezed-light source with full quantum-state tomography on TFLN, record-efficiency blue-light generation, and a low-power optical amplifier that intensifies light 100× on a chip.

I love taking hard ideas and turning them into working hardware, and I am drawn to ambitious problems where rigorous science becomes real-world technology. I'm always glad to connect — feel free to reach out.

What I Bring

Device Physics & Design

Nonlinear & quantum photonic device design — OPOs, resonators, second-harmonic and parametric amplifiers — backed by Lumerical / COMSOL modeling.

Nanofabrication

End-to-end thin-film lithium niobate processing: e-beam and photolithography, RIE/ICP dry etching, wet etching, thin-film deposition, and periodic poling.

Quantum & Optical Measurement

Homodyne/heterodyne detection, squeezed-light measurement, quantum-state tomography, and fiber-to-chip photonic test setups.

Automation & AI Workflows

Python/MATLAB instrument control (GPIB/serial), automated parameter sweeps, and LLM-assisted CAD layout, simulation, and data pipelines.

Recent News

Jan 2026
Our low-power on-chip optical amplifier is published in Nature and featured by Stanford News and Physics World.
Aug 2025
Presented our integrated OPO squeezer at the Nonlinear Optics Conference (Hawaii).
2025
Won Best Poster Award (runner-up) at the DARPA INSPIRED Program PI Meeting.
Mar 2024
"Single-mode squeezed-light generation and tomography with an integrated optical parametric oscillator" published in Science Advances.
Mar 2024
Integrated frequency-modulated OPO published in Nature; covered by Stanford News.