[Seminar] Leveraging Advances in Computational Electrodynamics to Enable New Kinds of Nanophotonic Device Design

​Who: Dr. Ardavan Oskooi, Founder and CEO of Simpetus 
When: Thursday, October 29th 12:00 pm
Where: ESB 2001

Snacks & Coffee will be provided.
​UPDATED: 
Ardavan Osooki is offering to meet personally with interested students and researchers to discuss how to use his electromagnetics FDTD software for your specific simulations, or how to how to program an FDTD software from scratch, as he has done.
If you are interested in a one-on-one meeting with him, please email to Tanya Das tdas@ece.ucsb.edu with your availability on Thursday, October 29th, and we will get back to you with a meeting time.

​Abstract: Advances in computational electrodynamics have the potential to enable fundamentally new kinds of designs in nanophotonic devices which are based principally on complex, non-analytical wave-interference effects. Powerful, flexible, open-source software tools have now been made available for use in large-scale, parallel computations to model the interaction of light with practically any kind of material in any arbitrary geometry. These recent developments in computational capability make possible the investigation of various emergent structures and physical phenomena that were previously beyond the reach of pencil-and-paper analytical methods as well as less versatile and even less accessible commercial software tools. Here, I demonstrate how such advances in finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods for computational electromagnetism via an open-source software package known as MEEP can lead to entirely new designs for light trapping in nanostructured thin-film silicon solar cells as well as light extraction from nanostructured organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). In the last part of this seminar, I will provide a live demonstration of launching MEEP simulations on an on-demand high-performance computing (HPC) cluster in the cloud through our startup, Simpetus. Simpetus provides a holistic solution to the three main challenges of using simulations for research and development: 1) no software licenses or installation, 2) no hardware acquisition or maintenance and 3) technial support from the experts. The mission of Simpetus is to propel computational simulations to the forefront of photonics research and development.

Bio: Ardavan Oskooi is the Founder and CEO of Simpetus, a San Francisco- startup offering an on-demand photonics simulation platform with a mission to propel computational simulations to the forefront of photonics R&D. Ardavan received his Sc.D. from MIT where he worked with Prof. Steven Johnson and John Joannopoulos (thesis: Computation & Design for Nanophotonics) to develop MEEP (ab-initio.mit.edu/meep). Ardavan has published 13 first-author articles in peer-reviewed journals and a book "Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology” with Prof. Allen Taflove of Northwestern University and Steven Johnson. He has a masters in Computation for Design and Optimization from MIT and completed his undergraduate studies, with honors, in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to launching Simpetus, he worked with Prof. Susumu Noda at Kyoto University and Stephen Forrest at the University of Michigan on leveraging MEEP to push the frontier of optoelectronic device design

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