 Tuesday, April 23rd | 12:00 pm | Elings 1601  Today zettabytes of data are generated and nearly doubled every two years. The conventional microprocessor is reaching its physical limitation and cannot keep up with the exponential growth in rich data. This leads to the increased demands on memory systems due to their frequent access patterns between microprocessors and memories. High speed, low energy and high sensitive optical data links are desirable for data transmission between multicores, microprocessors and memories in the new data center and high performance computer architectures. I am going to talk about the silicon photonics efforts in developing low energy high speed optical links in Hewlett Packard Labs, including the development of low voltage SiGe avalanche photodiodes, as well as photonic links. Refreshments Provided!  Dr. Zhihong Huang introduces her talk about silicon APDs developed at HP Labs. 
Monday, April 15 | 12:00pm | Elings 1605
 Refreshments Provided! Think small: developing color centers in crystals for nanoscale optical sensors of fields and forces4/7/2019
 Friday, April 12 | 12:00pm | Elings 1605 From mapping inter-cellular mechanical interactions in the immune system to imaging magnetic phenomena in condensed matter systems, there is a growing need for noninvasive sensors with high spatial resolution. Color centers in crystals such as alkaline-earth upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) and the nitrogenvacancy (NV) center in diamond are an exciting class of sensors for highresolution imaging because of their optical readout, nanoscale size, and robust hosts. The first part of this talk will discuss UCNPs for mechanical force sensing in biological applications. UCNPs consist of a ceramic host doped with lanthanides (Yb3+ and Er3+). They operate by absorbing low energy infrared photons and emitting higher energy visible photons. Mechanical forces cause a change in the crystal symmetry and spacing of the dopant atoms, which results in a change of emission intensity and color. We have recently detected 27 nN forces with our UCNPs, a requisite for detecting inter-cellular forces in the immune system. The second half of this talk will discuss using the NV center in diamond as a magnetic force sensor. Through careful materials science studies in the Jayich lab, we created NV ensembles approaching the NV dipolar interaction limit of sensitivity. Using these NV ensembles, we imaged magnetic structure in CoTiSb. Refreshments provided!  Dr. McLellan explains that the up-conversion wavelength of nanoparticles depends on the pressure exerted. This effect allows the particles to be used as nano-scale forces sensors.  Monday March 11th, 11am, ESB 1001 Abstract The continuing growth in demand for bandwidth (from residential and business users), necessitates significant research into new advanced technologies that will be employed in future broadband communication systems. Two specific technologies, becoming increasingly important for future photonic systems, are wavelength tunable lasers and optical frequency combs. Although these topics have been studied for over two decades their significance for the development of future ultra-high capacity photonic systems has only recently been fully understood. Wavelength tunable lasers are currently becoming the norm in optical communication systems because of their flexibility and ability to work on any wavelength. However, as their operating principles are different to standard single mode lasers they can effect how future systems will operate. For example as optical transmission systems move towards more coherent transmission (where the data is carried using both the intensity and phase of the optical carrier), the phase noise in these tunable lasers will become increasingly important. Optical frequency combs also have many applications for future photonics systems, and for telecommunications they can be used to obtain the highest spectral efficiency in optical transmission systems by employing the technology of optical frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), and also for generation of high frequency RF signals in future 5G networks. Wavelength tunable lasers and optical frequency combs are thus topics at the leading edge of current photonics systems research, and their detailed understanding promises new applications in all-optical signal processing, optical sensing and metrology, and specifically telecommunications. This talk will focus on the development and characterization of various wavelength tunable lasers and optical frequency combs, and then outline how these sources can be employed for developing optical transmission systems and networks which make the best use of available optical spectrum. Biography Liam Barry received his BE (Electronic Engineering) and MEngSc (Optical Communications) degrees from University College Dublin in 1991 and 1993 respectively. From February 1993 until January 1996 he was employed as a Research Engineer in the Optical Systems Department of France Telecom's Research Laboratories (now known as Orange Labs) in Lannion, France, and as a result of this work he obtained his PhD Degree from the University of Rennes in France. In February 1996 he joined the Applied Optics Center in Auckland University, New Zealand, as a Research Fellow and in March 1998 he took up a lecturing position in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University, and established the Radio and Optical Communications Laboratory. From April 2006 until February 2010 he served as Director of The Rince Institute, an interdisciplinary research center with over 100 researchers. He is currently a Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering, a Principal Investigator for Science Foundation Ireland, and Director of the Radio and Optical Communications Laboratory. His main research interests are; all-optical signal processing, optical pulse generation and characterization, hybrid radio/fibre communication systems, wavelength tuneable lasers for reconfigurable optical networks, and optical performance monitoring. He has published over 200 articles in international peer reviewed journals, 250 papers in international peer reviewed conferences, and holds 10 patents in the area of optoelectronics. He has been a TPC member for the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) since 2004, and a TPC member for the Optical Fibre Communication Conference (OFC) from 2007 to 2010, serving as Chair of the Optoelectronic Devices sub-committee for OFC 2010. Refreshments provided! 
12:00 PM Friday, March 1st in Elings 1605
Pizza will be provided! 
Thursday, Feb 28, 12 - 1 pm, ESB 1001
Refreshments will be provided 
Friday, Feb 8, 1 – 2 pm, ESB 1001 More than a billion individual VCSELs were deployed before 2017 as optical sources within short-reach optical interconnects as well as for position sensing. In 2018, laser manufacturing began the era of 2D VCSEL arrays. As a result more than a billion new VCSELs were added in a single year to provide new functionality for consumer electronics products. In this talk I will report on the development of coherently coupled VCSEL arrays which may enable new VCSEL applications. I will discuss the physics of operation for antiguided photonic crystal VCSEL arrays, and will show their potential application for electronic beam steering and high speed digital data transmission. Refreshments Provided! 
Friday, Jan. 25th at 12:00 PM in ESB 1001 Pizza will be provided 
Friday, Jan 18, 12 – 1 pm, Elings 1605 As various systems and networks in our society grow larger and more complex, analysis and optimization of such systems are becoming increasingly important. Such tasks are classified as combinatorial optimization problems, which are generally difficult to solve with current digital computers. It is well known that combinatorial optimization problems can be converted to ground-state-search problems of the Ising model, a theoretical model for the interacting spins. Recently, several approaches to find solutions to the Ising model using artificial spin systems have been studied intensively. A coherent Ising machine (CIM) is one of such systems in which degenerate optical parametric oscillators (DOPO) pulses are used as artificial spins. By using a long-distance (typically 1 km) fiber cavity that contains a phase sensitive amplifier based on a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide, we can generate thousands of DOPO pulses multiplexed in time domain. Since a DOPO phase only takes either 0 or p at above threshold, we can stably express an Ising spin with a DOPO by allocating phase 0 (p) as spin up (down). The “spin-spin interaction” can be implemented by using a measurement-feedback scheme, with which we can effectively realize mutual injection of lights among thousands of DOPO pulses. The networked DOPOs are most likely to oscillate at a phase configuration that best stabilize the whole network, which gives the solution to the given Ising problem. Based on this scheme, we realized a CIM with all-to-all-coupled 2000 DOPO pulses, by which we could find good solutions to 2000-node combinatorial optimization problems in less than 100 microseconds. In the talk, I will describe the basic principle and the experimental details of the CIM, as well as our effort for finding its applications. Refreshments Provided! 
Tuesday, Dec. 11th at 12:00 PM in Elings 3001
Pizza will be provided! 
Tuesday Dec. 4th at 12:30 pm in ESB 1001 Pizza will be provided! This is the start of the weekly student lecture series IEEE Photonics is hosting throughout Winter 2019! Ryan DeCrescent and Robert Zhang will be presenting their talks.   Wednesday November 28th, 2 pm, ESB 1001 Alex is an entrepreneur with a track record of building teams that take ideas from the research laboratory through commercialization. Alex was a co-founder, the CEO, and Board Director of Aurrion from 2008-2016 which was a fabless semiconductor company that developed photonic integrated circuits for data center networking applications. The business was acquired by Juniper Networks. Alex worked for IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Intel prior to founding Aurrion. Alex earned his M.S & Ph.D. from UCSB and is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management Program. In his downtime, Alex enjoys riding off road motorcycles, playing guitar, smoking meat and reading books. Alex loves spending time with his wife and daughter going to live shows, travelling and eating weird stuff. Refreshments Provided!   Dr. Ken-Tye Yong Director of the Bio Devices and Signal Analysis (VALENS) School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Tuesday, Nov. 20th, 3 - 4 pm, ESB 2001 Nanomaterials have been applied in healthcare applications such as cancer imaging, lymph node mapping and brain diseases therapy. These nanomaterials can be engineered to serve as a platform for challenges in highly sensitive optical diagnostic tools, biosensors, and guided imaging and therapy. The versatility of nanomaterials may provide the keys to improve diagnostics and therapy of human diseases. In this talk, we will highlight the use of nanomaterials with different sizes, compositions, and shapes for nanomedicine applications. This talk is intended to promote the awareness of past and present developments of nanomaterials in biomedical fields, the potential toxicity of nanomaterials, and the approaches to engineer new types of safe nanomaterials, whereby encouraging researchers to think about exciting and promising biophotonic and nanomedicine applications with nanomaterials in the future. Refreshments Provided!   Friday Nov 9th, 1pm, Elings 1605 The past decade has seen accelerated progress in III-V semiconductor infrared photodetector technology. The advent of the unipolar barrier infrared detector device architecture has in many instances greatly alleviated generation-recombination (G-R) and surface-leakage dark current issues that had been problematic for many III-V photodiodes. Meanwhile advances in a variety type-II superlattices (T2SLs) such as InGaAs/GaAsSb, InAs/GaSb, and InAs/InAsSb, as well as in bulk III-V material such as InGaAsSb and metamorphic InAsSb, have provided continuously adjustable detector cutoff wavelength coverage from the short wavelength infrared (SWIR) to the very long wavelength infrared (VLWIR). The confluence of these developments has led to a new generation of versatile, cost-effective, high-performance infrared detectors and focal plane arrays based on robust III-V semiconductors, providing a viable alternative to HgCdTe (MCT). Refreshments provided!   Prof.Brian Cunningham Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Bioengineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Tuesday, Oct 16th, 11am, ESB 1001  Circulating exosomal miRNA represents a potentially useful class of bloodborne biomarkers for cancer. We present the initial proof-of-concept of an approach in which gold nanoparticle tags are prepared with thermodynamically optimized nucleic acid toehold probes that displace a oligonucleotide and reveal a capture sequence that is used to selectively pull down the target-probe-nanoparticle complex to a photonic crystal (PC) biosensor surface. By matching the surface plasmon resonant wavelength of the nanoparticle tag to the resonant wavelength of the PC nanostructure, the reflected light intensity from the PC is dramatically and locally quenched by the presence of each nanoparticle. The talk described the optical operating principles of Photonic Resonator Absorption Microscopy (PRAM), the thermodynamic design of DNA toehold probes, and our first results demonstrating the detection limits, selectivity, and dynamic range of the assay. Refreshments provided!  Dr. Cunningham giving his talk about Microscopy Enabled by Nanostructured Surfaces.  Friday, Jun. 8th, 4:30 - 5:30 pm, ESB 2001 Communications networks and systems are seeing extreme increases in network traffic which is growing at the tremendous rate of 30% per year. It is estimated that the energy and cost requirements will increase tenfold in coming year. But this progress is not sustainable from an ecological and economic point of view. However, this information explosion can be dealt with, using the integration of very small photonic components on very high density Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs). The technolgoical advancements in PICs have made them a popular choice for components of next generation networks. Silicon being the evident choice due to its high availability, mature fabrication technology, and low cost has attracted components on a chip. At the same time, the unique, material properties and direct bandgap of group III-V materials have huge potential in applications like laser amplifiers, modulators, and detectors. Due to robustness, flexibility, reliability, and performance of PICs, many commercial solutions are now available for a variety of applications. Refreshments Provided!  Dr. Singh looking into the UCSB nanofab cleanroom during his visit. 
Abstract: In this presentation, Garrett provides an overview of how two scientists from the University of Vienna stumbled upon an enabling technology, born from fundamental research in the burgeoning field of cavity optomechanics, and made a successful transition from academia to industry. The fruit of this endeavor is “Crystalline Mirror Solutons,” or CMS, a photonics start-up commercializing high-performance optics for laser-based precision measurement and manufacturing systems. Here, Garrett outlines the key elements that led to their successes, including the conception of the underlying technology, as well as the supporting infrastructure and funding organizations that ultiately assisted in bringing this idea out of the laboratory and onto the commercial market. Bio: Dr. Garrett D. Cole, Co-Founder of Crystalline Mirror Solutions (www.crystallinemirrors.com), obtained his PhD in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005. Since completing his doctorate, he has held positions ranging from the first employee of a high-tech startup (Aerius Photonics LLC, now FLIR Electro-Optical Components), to a postdoctoral position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Marie Curie Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and, prior to leaving to found CMS, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna. In the course of his research career, Dr. Cole has co-authored 2 book chapters and published more than 50 journal articles and conference proceedings including papers in Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Leveraging his expertise in micro- and nanofabrication, tunable lasers, and cavity optomechanics, Dr. Cole developed the proprietary substrate-transfer process at the heart of Crystalline Mirror Solutions and, along with Professor Markus Aspelmeyer, co-founded the venture in February 2012. 
Abstract: Success in a photonic startup company requires constant attention to the balance between risk and opportunity. These risk / opportunity decisions involve many different areas, technical, marketing, financial, organizational and psychological, among others. Some of these decisions are very specific to photonic startup issues but the balance of opportunity and risk touches on a broad range of aspects of life, of course. This presentation discussed the general nature of risk and opportunity and from these general ideas will then derive recommendations for effective risk management methods in photonic startups. The presenter did this through examples drawn from his own experience and from the experience of others that have influenced him strongly Bio: Dr. Daniel Renner received a Ph.D in Opto-Electronics from the University of Cambridge in England. This has been followed by 37 years of industrial experience, where he has been deeply involved with the development, manufacturing and commercialization of complex photonic devices and systems used in communication, sensor and industrial applications. His experience spans both the technical and the commercialization aspects of photonic products, having led activities in many areas, including technology and product development, identification of new business areas, introduction of new products, marketing and sales. Through this experience he has gained a respectful appreciation for the critical importance of effective business risk management.  Where: ESB 1001
When: Friday, June 9, 12:00PM Lunch will be provided Abstract: The excitement of nanowire research is due to the unique electronic and optical properties of these nanostructures. Both axial and radial heterostructure nanowires have been proposed as nano‐building blocks for the next generation devices, which are expected to revolutionise our technological world. The unique properties stem from their large surface area‐to‐volume ratio, very high aspect ratio, and carrier and photon confinement in two dimensions. These nanowires are usually grown by the so‐called vapor‐liquid‐solid mechanism, which relies on a metal nanoparticle to catalyze and seed the growth. An alternative technique to grow the nanowires is by selective area growth technique, where a dielectric mask is first patterned on the substrate prior to growth. In this talk, I will present an overview of compound semiconductor nanowire research activities at The Australian National University. The optical and structural properties of binary and ternary III‐V nanowires including GaAs, InGaAs, InP and GaAsSb nanowires grown by metal‐ organic vapour phase epitaxy will be presented. Various issues such as tapering of the nanowires, compositional non‐uniformity along nanowires, crystal structure, carrier lifetime and polarization effect will be discussed. I will also present our results of III‐V nanowires grown on Si substrates which are of great interests for the integration of nano‐optoelectronic devices on Si platforms. Our results of enhancing the quantum efficiency of nanowires by using plasmonics are promising to improve the performance of nanowire devices. Finally, the results from our nanowire lasers, photodetectors, solar cells and photoelectrodes for water splittng will be presented. Bio: Professor H. Hoe Tan is currently the Head of the Department of Electronic Materials Engineering at the Research School of Physics and Engineering, The Australian National University. He received his B.E. (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Melbourne in 1992, after which he worked with Osram in Malaysia as a quality assurance engineer. In 1997, he was awarded the PhD degree from the Australian National University for his dissertation on "Ion beam effects in GaAs‐AlGaAs materials and devices". He has been the past recipient of the Australian Research Council Postdoctoral, QEII and Future Fellowships. He has published/co‐published over 350 journal papers, including four book chapters. He is also a co‐inventor in 4 US patents related to laser diodes and infrared photodetectors. His research interests include epitaxial growth of lowdimensional compound semiconductors, nanostructured optoelectronic devices and ion‐ implantation processing of compound semiconductors for optoelectronic device applications. Prof. Tan is a Senior Member of the IEEE. 
Date: Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Location: UCSB, Engineering Science Building, Rooms ESB1001, ESB 2001, ESB 2003
Join us for our spring event the 2017 Light Science Workshop for a day of talks and presentations about the cutting edge in photonics research and career opportunities in this blossoming industry. The event will feature a keynote speaker, technical and non-technical presentations, Q&A panels, a job fair and a poster session!
The presentations will have two tracks: Technical and non-technical. The Technical Track will feature lectures on cutting-edge research in the area from varying fields that use and manipulate light. The Non-Technical Track will focus on careers in the industry and professional development. Keep checking back on this page for the most up-to-date information! The event is free for those affiliated with a university or college. Otherwise, general admission to the event is $20.
If you are interested in sponsoring the event or holding a booth at the career fair, please contact us
Agenda
Please see our Program of Events for more information!
Keynote Speech — Seeing Heat: Thermal Vision Everywhere You Look
Technical and Non-technical Presenters
Technical and Non-technical talks will include presentations from speakers representing research groups, photonics companies, and partnerships and collaborations at UCSB and around Santa Barbara. A sample of our scheduled speakers will include the following:
Optoelectronics Research Group of John Bowers Dan Blumenthal, Optical Communication and Photonic Integration Group Phil Lubin, UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group AIM Photonics Freedom Photonics Unite To Light Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP) at CNSi UCSB Nanofabrication Facility Event Flyer
This event is made possible with the generous support of:
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