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Integrated Nanophotonics in Silicon for Nonlinear Optics
Michael Hochberg
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington Silicon has recently been used to build chip-scale optical and optoelectronic devices, using the same nanoscale fabrication processes used to make transistor-based electronic chips. Because of the ability to build nanoscale, high-confinement Silicon waveguides, it is possible to greatly enhance nonlinear optical effects and to construct complex, low-power, ultrafast optical devices and systems. Through evanescent coupling to these waveguides, it is possible to take advantage of the properties of high-activity soft optical materials. I will review the state of the field and will present a number of our recent results, including optical-rectification based detectors, electrooptic modulators, and all-optical ultrafast modulators. This talk will cover progress into the use of Silicon and Silicon:Polymer nanostructures to create an integrated platform for nonlinear and ultrafast optics, and will include a discussion of some of the major challenges for building all-optical, ultrafast systems for computation and logic.
Michael Hochberg received his BS (Physics, 2002), his MS (Applied Physics, 2005) and his PhD (Applied Physics, 2006) from Caltech. As an undergraduate, he cofounded Luxtera, a venture-funded company that has raised over $50m to commercialize silicon photonics, and he spent a year there full-time after finishing his undergraduate work. As a graduate student, he has worked on developing ultrafast nonlinear optical devices using silicon photonics. This research agenda has included the development of all-optical switches operating at terahertz bandwidth, the integrated optical rectification based detectors, and a variety of other linear and nonlinear optical devices. He is the recipient of an NSF graduate research fellowship and a Caltech upper class merit award. He was awarded the Demetriades-Tsafka Prize in Nanotechnology for the best thesis by a graduating Ph.D. student in the field of Nanotechnology. He has recently joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Electrical Engineering. |