Research Areas

Silicon Photonics

Silicon photonics is the study of photonics based on silicon. Silicon has a high index, which offers good optical confinement, and is transparent to the infrared region which is used as modern optical communications via optical fibers. By properly changing the structure of silicon devices, one can produce many special properties such as nonlinearities based on many optical phenomenons like Kerr nonlinearity, 2 photon absoprtion, Raman effect, second-order nonlinearity, et al. Today's state of the art fabrication technologies have opened the road to fabrication of very delicate structures. It is considered the next step towards communications and information processing due to its fats response speed and low loss.

Integrated Micro/Nano Photonics

Various photonics components have different functions and integrating them can purpose as a total system. Precise integration of micro/nanometer size structures such as microlasers, resonators, lasers, photodiodes are important for maximum performance.  A wide variety of materials such as 3-5 semiconductors, silicon, metals, dielectrics are used, and their material compatability is also important.

Metamaterials and Quantum Optics

Special nanosize structures, metamaterials, can yield special phenomenons not observed in nature. Special formation of structures such as nanopillars, tapered waveguides, fishbone slits can induce light control such as slow light propagation, rainbow trapping. Even smaller structures can induce quantum optics based phenomenons such as single photon sources, which are expected to be the key building block of future quantum bases technologies. Advanced simulation, fabrication, and analysis tools are necessary for deep understanding of these nonlinear optical performances.