Assistant Prof. Eran Lustig, 38, who recently joined the Technion’s faculty, brings with him an impressive resumé of cutting-edge research in nonlinear and quantum optics within photonic microchips and integrated photonic platforms. He has ambitious plans for his new lab at the Technion and aims to realize his vision of developing novel photonic integrated microchips as well as exploring and engineering the quantum optical interactions within them.
Prof. Lustig arrived at the Technion in January 2026 just four years after receiving his doctoral degree from the Technion’s Department of Physics. Having grown up in Haifa, the son of two Technion alumni, he has felt at home on the campus from a young age, having participated in extracurricular activities at the Technion during high school. After his army service, he completed a double degree in physics and electrical engineering at the Technion, graduating with honors, and continued to a direct PhD in Optics. His next stop was a 3.5-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Ginzton Laboratory.
Today, Lustig is once again at the Technion, this time as an assistant professor affiliated with the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Solid State Institute, and the Helen Diller Quantum Center. His interests have always been at the intersection of physics and electrical engineering, and while his early years focused on theory and simulations, he is now primarily an experimentalist. “I believe building systems that push science to the extreme is the best way to advance,” he attests.
The new lab that Lustig is establishing at the Technion will be at the forefront of research, venturing into uncharted territory in the field of nonlinear optics. In particular, he is interested in exploring what happens when photons interact strongly with crystals. “We know electrons in materials exhibit very rich physics. We want to explore what happens when we replace the electrons with photons which are massless. I believe this will lead to discovering novel ‘states of light’ which, just like new states of matter, have the potential to revolutionize science and technology,” he explains.
Lustig’s innovative approach involves studying photonic interactions through the dimension of time, rather than space. “Instead of creating the lattices in space, I create them in the time and frequency domains,” he elaborates, adding that “using tiny micro-resonators, I force photons to interact strongly over a broad frequency range that can potentially reach a hundred Terahertz.” The new lab will build this unique platform using special non-linear materials and light sources.
One of the main reasons Lustig decided to return to the Technion after his postdoc at Stanford’s Ginzton Laboratory is that the Technion’s Solid State Institute and the HDQC offer similar scientific opportunities. Both institutions are multidisciplinary in nature and provide world-class engineering capabilities with an emphasis on experimental quantum science.
“I started out in optics during my PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Moti Segev. At first, I dealt with analogies for condensed matter in optics. We built optical systems that imitated different phases in solid states. For example, we demonstrated photonic flows that didn’t have backscattering,” Lustig explains.
In 2018, he published a groundbreaking paper in the prestigious journal Nature that showed that these phenomena can be seen in non-spatial dimensions. Shortly afterwards, he published a second paper in Nature, proving that these phases can be observed in three dimensions, where the third dimension is frequency. These breakthroughs earned him prestigious research grants.
During his doctoral studies, Lustig also attempted to observe phase transitions in time, rather than in space, exploring the concept of periodicity in time. This led to a widely cited paper in the journal Optica which demonstrated this on a theoretical level. “I then decided that I wanted to build an experiment that would test this phenomenon – and from that point I became an experimental scientist. I successfully proved the first step,” he recalls, adding that this line of research is still ongoing, as more building blocks are being demonstrated in the Technion and by multiple research groups around the world.
During his postdoctoral research at Stanford, Lustig switched his focus to the field of integrated photonics. He was part of a group that worked on photonic integrated circuits, integrating various materials and fabrication techniques to measure quantum and classical phenomena. In particular, he focused on 4H-silicon carbide on insulator, an interesting platform with quantum emitters that is also highly non-linear.
“I tried to develop a platform where I would be able to apply quantum lattice phenomena on a microchip ,” he says. This led to a paper in Nature Photonics detailing emerging lattice phenomena in the Gaussian regime – providing the breakthrough needed to obtain more advanced quantum phenomena that cannot be simulated or predicted.
Now that he is back at the Technion, Prof. Lustig is eager to take the work he has accomplished so far in his career – simulations and studying complex interactions – to the next level, in the direction of many body physics and quantum simulations, leveraging the technology he worked on and developed at Stanford as the platform.
As such, his new lab will engage in new chip fabrication techniques, with the goal of transforming this vision into large-scale initiatives. “We will ask deep questions about the optical interactions and try to apply this to a platform of integrated photonics.” The idea is to take microchips that are fabricated in his lab or with foundries, and study complex and useful quantum phenomena, including quantum entanglement and quantum squeezing over hundreds of modes.
The lab will be designed to enable quantum measurements using this innovative platform and will require specialized equipment to facilitate strong photon-photon interactions. To achieve this goal, the new lab will feature high-quality lasers and single photon detectors, among other cutting-edge equipment. Although the new lab will only be completed in another year, Prof. Lustig has already started assembling his research group and he has started working in a temporary lab and in the Technion clean room.
Eran Lustig is enthusiastic about the scientific opportunities available at the Technion and looks forward to settling in as a new faculty member. Although the latest war with Iran broke out only a month after he returned to Israel, Lustig is happy to be back and enjoys the feeling of community on campus. He lives with his wife and young daughter in the Technion’s dorms for young faculty.