Friday, October 23rd, 11 am (PDT) via Zoom Dr. Christian Reimer is a physicist and entrepreneur working in the fields of nonlinear optics, integrated photonics and quantum optics. He received graduate degrees from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, and the National Institute of Scientific Research in Canada. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, before becoming Co-Founder and Head of Product of HyperLight Corporation. HyperLight, a Venture-Capital funded start-up out of Harvard University, is specialized on integrated lithium niobate technologies for ultra-high performance photonic solutions. In the scientific part of his talk, Christian will introduce the field of integrated photonics based on thin-film lithium niobate, with a focus on electro-optic applications, as well as recent progress on transforming the field from chip-based proof-of-concept realizations for wafer-scale production. In the professional development section, he will then share his experience transitioning from academia to a start-up company. He will talk about differences and similarities in the work environment, what to expect in terms of tasks and responsibilities, and explain how salaries at start-ups can include combinations of equity and incentives.
Images from hyperlightcorp.com
Friday, Oct. 16th, 4 pm (PDT) via Zoom Henley Hall will hold state-of-the-art research facilities for developing energy-efficient technologies. Prof. Bowers will present the research capabilities and expected research ramp-up timeline for the new building.  Thursday, Oct. 8, 1-2 pm (PDT) via Zoom Meeting ID: 819 4601 6935, Password: 597044 Entanglement and encoding in discrete frequency bins – a quantum analogue of wavelength-division multiplexing – represents a relatively new degree of freedom for quantum information with photons. Potential advantages include generation of high-dimensional units of quantum information called qudits, which can carry multiple qubits per photon; robust transmission over fiber; frequency parallelism and routing; and compatibility with on-chip implementations, as well as hyperentanglement with other photonic degrees of freedom. In this talk I first give an overview of manipulating and measuring quantum states encoded and entangled in the photonic frequency degree of freedom. I will then discuss our recent experiments that focus on high-dimensional entanglement and mixing of multiple frequency bins in a single operation, going well beyond nearest neighbor “interactions.
 Tuesday, September 8th, 10 am (PDT) via Zoom Meeting ID: 978 3569 2970 Passcode: 468555 Infectious diseases and water are some of the greatest, most urgent challenges of the 21st century. III-nitride ultraviolet (UV) light sources, including light emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers, are the only alternative technology to replace conventional power-hungry, hazardous mercury lamps for disinfection and water purification. Recent studies showed that AlGaN-based UV-C LEDs can readily shred genetic material of viruses and bacterial and achieve 99.9% sterilization of SARS-COV-2. In this talk, I will present the recent advances of AlGaN and BN nanostructures and heterostructures and their applications in UV optoelectronics, including the first demonstration of mid and deep UV laser diodes and tunnel junction UV-C LEDs with significantly improved performance. The recent development of far-UV-C LEDs, in the wavelength range of 207-222 nm, will also be presented, which has shown to be faster and far more effective than traditional UV-C light (~265 nm) in preventing the transmission of microbial diseases, while causing virtually no harm to mammalian skin or eye.
 Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 1 p.m. Sustainability applied to networking is about treating professional support and assistance like a resource, and creating more of it than you take. Dr. Willis will discuss principles and applications of sustainable professional networking, and how to use it to generate success through mutually beneficial professional relationships. She will also discuss her own career path, citing examples that illustrate the value of sustainable networking.
Engineering robust solid-state quantum systems is amongst the most pressing challenges to realize scalable quantum photonic circuitry. While several 3D systems (such as diamond or silicon carbide) have been thoroughly studied, solid state emitters in two dimensional (2D) materials are still in their infancy. In this presentation I will discuss single defects in an emerging 2D material – hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), that is promising as qubits for quantum photonic applications. In particular, I will focus on ways to engineer these defects deterministically using either chemical vapour deposition growth or ion implantation, and show results on strain tuning of these ultra-bright quantum emitters. I will then highlight promising avenues to integrate the single defects with photonic cavities, as a first step towards integrated quantum photonics with 2D materials. I will summarize by outlining challenges and promising directions in the field of quantum emitters and nanophotonics with 2D materials.
Watch the recorded lecture from April 23, 2020:
 12:00 - 1:00 PM Friday, February 21st in Engineering II 3519
 Friday, Feb 14th from 12:00 - 1:00 pm in Elings 1601
Friday, February 7th from 12:00 - 1:00 pm in ESB 2001 The electrical power consumed in data transmission systems is now hampering efforts to further increase speed and capacity at various scales, ranging from data centers to microprocessors. Optical interconnects employing ultra-low-energy directly-modulated lasers will play a key role in reducing the power consumption. Since a laser's operating energy is proportional to the size of its active volume, developing high-performance laser with a small cavity is important. For this purpose, we have developed DFB and photonic crystal (PhC) lasers, in which active regions are buried with an InP layer. Thanks to the reduction of cavity size and the increase in optical confinement factor, we have achieved an extremely small operating energy of 4.4 fJ/bit by employing a wavelength-scale PhC cavity. Cost reduction is also an important issue because a larger number of transmitters are required for short-distance optical links. For this purpose, Si photonics technology is expected to be a potential solution because it can provide large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Therefore, heterogeneous integration of III-V compound semiconductors and Si has attracted much attention. To fabricate these devices, we have developed wafer-scale fabrication that employs regrowth of III-V compound semiconductors on directly-bonded thin InP templates on an SiO2/Si substrate.  Dr. Matsuo discusses some of the equations related to semiconductor lasers. 
Thursday, January 30th, 11 am, Elings 1605 NASA’s trend toward less costly missions has created a need for smaller and more capable instruments for in situ planetary applications, space weather, and Earth Observations. The rise of cubesats has created a new powerful platform that if enabled with powerful sensing technology can be an instrument of discovery. At the same time, large aperture UV/visible/Near Infrared space telescope are being planned for cosmology and astrophysics studies that will need high performance yet affordable detectors to populate their very large focal plane arrays. In nearly all these facets of space exploration, there is a strong need for high signal to noise ultraviolet detection technology. This is due to the fact that the ultraviolet part of the spectrum is rich in spectral information that are key to study exo-solar planets, protoplanets, intergalactic medium, supernovae, electromagnetic counterpart of gravitational wave, star formation, galaxy evolution, and more. Semiconductor detectors offer a rich spectral range, tailorable spectral response, high resolution, and sensitivity; however, these capabilities are not available in a single material or class of material. For example, while silicon imagers have reached high performance levels in format, pixel size, and signal to noise, they are naturally insensitive to ultraviolet light. Using non-equilibrium processes, we can manipulate materials at nanometer scale, form unusual and quantum structures, and alter bandstructures. Through nanoscale surface and interface engineering of 2D doping (superlattice doping and delta doping) high performance silicon-based imagers are produced with record high quantum efficiency in the ultraviolet. Furthermore, the response of silicon imagers can be tailored for out of band rejection through nano-scale interface engineering. In this talk we will discuss the underlying physics of the ultraviolet silicon detectors, their performance, their integration in systems, and their application in cubesats and space flagship missions. We will also discuss the synergy between the requirements for instruments in NASA space applications and medical applications and show how space technologies can and have been used for medical applications. Coffee provided!  Dr. Nikzad introduces here work at NASA on Si-based UV detectors applications on cubesats.  Blue Semipolar III-Nitride Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers
Friday, January 24th | 12:00 pm | ESB 2001
Pizza will be provided! Come and mingle for any sessions during the first all-online photonics conference, the Photonics Online Meetup (POM). The event will be continuously live-streamed between 11am and 4pm in Elings 1605. Refreshments will be served. The conference will feature internationally renowned scientists as plenary speakers:
https://sites.usc.edu/pom/program/  
Thurs. Nov 14, 2019 | 12:00 - 1:00 pm | ESB 2001 Photonic technologies are at the forefront of the ongoing 4th industrial revolution of digitalization supporting applications such as virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, and electronic warfare. The development of integrated photonics in recent years enabled functional devices and circuits through miniaturization. However, fundamental challenges such as the weak light-matter integration can limited silicon and III-Vbased devices to millimeter-scale footprints demanding about one million photons-per-bit. Overcoming these challenges, in the first part of this talk I will show how nanoscale photonics together with heterogeneous integration of emerging materials into foundry-based photonic chips enables strong nonlinearity, which we use to demonstrate attojoule and compact optoelectronics. Here I will discuss our recent devices demonstrating ITO-based MZI modulators, 2D-material excitonic photodetectors, and exotic epsilon-near-zero modes empowering record-efficient phase shifters for applications in data-comm, LiDAR, and photonic neural networks (NN). Further, I will show that the usually parasitic Kramers-Kronig relations of altering the optical index can be synergistically exploited delivering new modulator operations. With Moore’s law and Dennard scaling now being limited by fundamental physics, the trend in processor heterogeneity suggests the possibility for special-purpose photonic processors such as NNs or RF-signal & image filtering. Here unique opportunities exist, for example, given by algorithmic parallelism of analog computing enabling non-iterative O(1) processors, thus opening prospects for distributed nonvan Neumann architectures. In the second part of this talk, I will share our latest work on analog photonic processors to include a) a feed-forward fully-connected NN, b) mirror symmetry perception via coincidence detection of spiking NNs, c) a Fourier-optics based convolutional processor with 1 PMAC/s throughputs at nanosecond-short delays for real-time processing, d) a photonic residue arithmetic adder, and e) meshbased reconfigurable photonic & metatronic PDE solvers. In summary, heterogeneous photonics connects the worlds of electronics and optics, thus enabling new classes of efficient optoelectronics and analog processors by employing the distinctive properties of light. Pizza will be provided! 
Wednesday, July 31 | 12:00pm | ESB 2001  Photonic Integration for RF Photonics Systems Photonic integration on the Silicon Photonics platform, together with heterogeneous integration to include other materials, provides an ideal platform for the development of complex photonic integrated circuit (PIC) devices. This talk will describe the requirements for basic RF Photonics systems, including low noise lasers, linear modulators, low loss optical processing elements, and high power photodetectors, followed by descriptions of devices and PICs that Morton Photonics is developing for these functions. The talk will describe how a high performance PIC including arrays of these devices can be utilized for the processing of a phased array sensor to provide Multiple-Channel Simultaneous RF Beamforming, and describe potential commercial markets for these technologies, including automotive LIDAR systems, analog photonic links and RF Beamforming for 5G systems Refreshments Provided!  Dr. Paul Morton introduces his talk about RF Photonic Systems 
Friday, June 7th | 12:00pm | Elings 1605
The 3rd Santa Barbara Photonics Banquet took place on: Tuesday June 4th, 6pm at Corwin Pavilion @ UCSB See the event page for more info: SB Photonics Banquet 2019 
Friday, May 31st | 12:00 pm | Elings 1605
 
Friday, May 17th | 12:00 pm | ESB 2001 Fluency Lighting Technologies is an early stage start-up company developing technology out of UC Santa Barbara. At Fluency, we are creating next-generation bright and narrow-beam light sources for highly efficient illumination, using laser technology and materials design. Our focus is the development of low-cost, optical platforms that convert laser diode emission into high-quality white light in various light levels, beam angles, and color temperatures, designed for customer-driven metrics, in applications where energy-saving LED technology is not used because of the limited light output from an LED. Refreshments will be provided  Dr. Denault begins her talk about the work done in lighting technology at her company, Fluency.   Thursday, May 16th | 12:00 pm | Elings 1601 In recent years, widely tunable micro-electro-mechanical systems vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (MEMS-VCSELs) have found commercial application in swept source optical coherence tomography medical imaging and also show considerable promise in metrology and spectroscopy. These devices exhibit fractional tuning ranges of >11% of the center wavelength, wavelength tuning repetition rates over full tuning range of >1MHz, and clean single-mode operation. These properties, in conjunction with small size and wafer scale fabrication and testing, promise an economical optical source that can impact sensing applications from the visible to the mid-infrared.
Refreshments will be provided  Dr. Jayaraman begins his talk about different applications for MEMS-Tunable VCSELs |
