Upcoming Speakers...

27 Oct 05

Friday Oct. 28, 9am Physics Tea Room
Prof. Pieter Kik
Assistant Professor of Optics and Physics
School of Optics/CREOL/FPCE
University of Central Florida

Surface Plasmon Optics
Weblink: http://kik.creol.ucf.edu

Friday Oct. 28, 3:30pm Slade Lecture Theatre, School of Physics
Special School Colloquium
Prof. Michal Lipson,
Nanophotonics Group
Cornell University

Manipulating Light on Chip: Photonics on chip could enable a platform for monolithic integration of optics and microelectronics for applications of optical interconnects in which high data streams are required in a small footprint. In this talk I will review the challenges and achievement in the field of Silicon Nanophotonics and present our recent results. Using highly confined photonic structures, much smaller than the wavelength of light, we have demonstrated ultra-compact passive and active silicon photonic components with very low loss. The highly confined photonic structures enhance the electro-optical and non-linearities properties of Silicon. We demonstrated several active components including all-optical and electro-optic low power switches and modulators on silicon.

Biography
Michal Lipson completed her B.S., MS and Ph.D. degree in physics in the Technion Israel in 1998. In Dec 1998 she joined the Department of Material Science and Engineering in MIT as a postdoctoral associate. She then joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Cornell University in 2001 as an Assistant Professor. Her research in Cornell involves novel on-chip Nanophotonics devices. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2004 and is the inventor of 8 patents on novel micron-size photonic structures for light manipulation and the author of over 40 papers in the major research journals in physics and Optics. She is currently a topical editor of Optics Letters.

Monday Oct. 31, 3:30pm Slade Lecture Theatre, School of Physics
School Colloquium
Prof. Oskar J. Painter
Assistant Professor of Applied Physics
California Institute of Technology

Web: http://copilot.caltech.edu/
Geometry and Scale in Photonics:The scaling of optoelectronic devices to smaller and smaller spatial dimensions results, at least theoretically, in an increased device density and reduced optical system size. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, there is also a corresponding increase in the strength of light-matter interactions with reduced size scale, an effect which can dramatically alter the power, speed, and efficiency of an optical device. Geometry below or at the wavelength scale also plays an intricate role in optics, as demonstrated recently in the work on engineered photonic crystals and so-called “left-handed” materials. In this talk I will discuss the application of geometry and scale in optical structures to several different areas of our own current research at Caltech: chip-scale atom-cavity QED, plasmon-optics, and silicon microphotonics.

Friday November 4, 9am Physics Tea Room, School of Physics
Mr. Badise Ben Bakir, PhD student
Laboratoire Electronique Optoelectronique Microsystemes
Ecole centrale de Lyon
France

Talk Subject: "Fano resonances in III-V photonic crystal slab structures with applications to
broadband reflectors, ultralowthreshold laser microsources and nonlinear optics"

Friday November 11, 9am Physics Tea Room, School of Physics
Dr Christopher G. Poulton
Institute for High Frequency and Quantum Electronics
University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Talk Subject: Accurate modelling of high index rib waveguides

Friday November 25, 9am Physics Tea Room, School of Physics
Prof. Sajeev John
Dept. of Physics, University of Toronto

Weblink: http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~john/
Subject: n/a yet