Jones Seminar: Design and engineering of coupled photonic nanostructures with enhanced light-matter interactions on the silicon platform

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Meeting ID: 923 9477 7186
Passcode: 501051

The manipulation of light-matter interactions using dispersion-engineered materials and the ability to perform inverse design of photonic structures are at the heart of current nanophotonics and metamaterials technologies. For example, enhanced optical nonlinearity in epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) solid-state materials provides unique opportunities to engineer novel optoelectronic devices with order-of-unity refractive index modulation and ultrafast nonlinear optical responses for dynamically tunable metasurfaces, optical modulators, and time-varying photonics applications on the chip. Moreover, the inverse design of light transport and multiple scattering phenomena in complex photonic media by rigorous adjoint optimization and physics- informed deep learning techniques is rapidly transforming the landscape of optical engineering by providing optimal solutions for miniaturized imaging and spectroscopy, multifunctional diffractive optics, classical and quantum information processing.

In this talk, I will discuss our recent activities on the development of ENZ materials with tailored optical dispersion, resonant photon trapping and coupled photonic nanostructures with enhanced Kerr-type nonlinear interactions on the silicon chip. Specifically, I will focus on harmonic generation and exceptional, order-of-unity refractive index modulation effects recently discovered in indium-tin oxide (ITO) materials and nanostructures strongly coupled to optical Tamm states and bound states in the continuum (BICs). Finally, I will present our research on topological design and adjoint optimization of high-Q optical cavities with nanoscale mode volume and functional photonic patches for light steering, broadband focusing, lensless imaging and spectroscopic applications on the chip. 

Hosted by Professor Jifeng Liu.

About the Speaker(s)

Luca Dal Negro
Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, BU

Luca Dal Negro is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University (BU), a member of the BU Photonics Center, and holds appointments in the Department of Physics and the Division of Materials Science. Professor Dal Negro conducts research on the theoretical and experimental aspects of light transport, scattering, and localization phenomena in complex photonic media, nano and quantum optics, metamaterials, and AI-driven inverse design and optimization methods. He was associate editor of MRS Communications and of European Physical Journal Plus, has authored over 250 technical papers and 16 book chapters, and has a Google Scholar h-index of 66 with more than 17,600 citations. He has received several research awards including the Early Career Research Excellence Award and the National Science Foundation Career Award. Dal Negro was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America (currently OPTICA) "for his numerous contributions in the theoretical and experimental aspects of wave interaction with aperiodic nanostructures." He received his PhD in physics from the University of Trento (Italy) and worked at MIT as a post-doctoral research associate. 

Contact

For more information, contact Amos Johnson at amos.l.johnson@dartmouth.edu.