Meta-Optics Mediated Light-Matter Interaction

Harnessing the interaction between light and matter shapes our understanding of the universe. Imaging through disorder with high spatial and temporal resolution, for instance, can teach us something new about cells and other galaxies alike. Likewise, light manipulation, storage, and detection is the foundation of photonic-based technologies including quantum computing, communications, and sensing. At the heart of these developments lies an optical component that tailors the spatial and temporal properties of incoming light in a non-trivial manner either on chip or in free space. In this pursuit, digital holography, metamaterials, metasurfaces, 2D materials, and nano wires have been widely investigated over the past years. Yet much effort is still underway to be able to manipulate light with high resolution, speed and efficiency to serve those applications.

My lab will: a) explore the fundamental constraints and tradeoffs in some of these wavefront shaping platforms, and b) introduce novel concepts and approaches that help alleviate those limits, and c) work towards integrating the devised component in a larger system for solving a pressing challenge in classical or quantum information processing, optical communications, imaging and sensing, or holography and AR/VR. 

Available research directions include (but are not limited) to the following:

1. Combining meta-optics and 2D materials for building efficient quantum devices.

2. Light transport through scattering and disordered media with active meta-optics.

3. Tailoring the spatial and temporal coherence of an optical beam and exploring its use in remote sensing.

4. Ultrafast pulse shaping and spin-orbit interaction of light with time-varying metasurfaces.

5. Metasurface integration on-chip for neuromorphic computing and AR/VR applications.