Zac Dutton

Lead Scientist Raytheon BBN Technologies

Dr. Zachary Dutton is a Lead Scientist who currently manages the Physical Sciences and Systems (PS2) business unit within Raytheon BBN Technologies. This group of over 100 staff does advanced R&D across several lines of business, including maritime systems, sensor systems artificial intelligence, embedded processing, quantum and photonic technologies, and hostile fire detection. Previous to that he led the Quantum Information Processing business unit, which more than doubled staff and annual revenue during his tenure. He joined Raytheon BBN Technologies in 2007 and there his research focused on quantum enhanced optical remote sensing (LIDAR), quantum networks, quantum limited communication receivers and codes, superconducting quantum circuits, and quantum computation. Dr. Dutton and his team earned the 2012 Raytheon Excellence in Engineering and Technology Award for contributions to the development and demonstration of novel receivers and codes for photon efficient communications. He was involved in the first demonstration of coherent population trapping in superconducting circuits. He has also contributed to research in extending the rate and distance of quantum communication networks with solid state quantum memories. Dr. Dutton received his B.S. in physics at UC Berkeley (1996) and PhD in theoretical physics at Harvard (2002) in the group of Prof. Lene Hau. Following that he did a National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship at NIST-Gaithersburg with Dr. Charles Clark and was then a staff physicist at the Naval Research Lab. Dr. Dutton’s PhD thesis work included seminal work in nonlinear coherent optics, including observation of optical transparency, ultra-slow light down to 17 m/s, and reversible, coherent storage of optical information in cold atomic systems. Following that he pursued a variety of topics in cold atomic gases, low light level nonlinear optics, quantum memories, and coherent optical storage. Dr. Dutton is a prolific researcher with over 80 papers in refereed journals and conference publications and is an active member of the American Physical Society and Optical Society of America.