Optical systems are all around us in modern society, with a vast range of applications spanning various fields, including medical sciences (such as vision technologies, surgical instrumentation, and medical imaging), spatial exploration (including telescopes, lenses, and spectrometers), telecommunications (utilizing fiber optics), information processing (such as quantum computing), and industry (including cutting, welding, and precision metrology). In addition to these applications, laser and optical technology is also essential in performing applied research in fields such as chemistry and biology, providing fundamental analysis tools.

The success of optical systems and technologies in high-end scientific research has also found its way into everyday consumer products such as printers, displays, discs, cameras, and eyeglasses. Notably, optical fiber plays a critical role in telecommunications, powering the internet and enabling communication across vast distances.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides due to several attractive features, such as strong light confinement, low loss in the near- and mid-infrared regions, cost-effectiveness, and compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Silicon also exhibits a Kerr nonlinearity over 200 times larger than that of silica, making it an ideal material for nonlinear effects in waveguides. Due to the relatively large refractive index of silicon, light can be confined within an area so small that nonlinear effects can be enhanced by more than a factor of 1000, or even more depending on the effective area. Consequently, nonlinear effects in SOI waveguides can be enhanced by more than a factor of 10,000 compared to silica fiber, leading to highly efficient supercontinuum (SC) generation at lower peak powers and longer pulse widths of the pump laser. Broadband SC sources generated based on nonlinear phenomena in fibers and waveguides have many applications in fields such as fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy, molecular spectroscopy, bio-imaging, optical coherence tomography, photonic device testing, photoacoustic microscopy, semiconductor inspection and metrology, industrial sorting and machine vision, medical instrumentation, flow cytometry, fiber sensing, fiber component characterization, and high-precision frequency metrology.

Dr. Hamed Saghaei is an accomplished researcher and expert in the field of integrated photonics, with a focus on a variety of topics including photonic crystals, silicon-on-insulator, solar cells, optoelectronic devices, and photonic integrated circuits. He is particularly interested in utilizing silicon-on-insulator technology to develop the next generation of all-optical CPUs, as well as generating visible, near-, and mid-infrared supercontinuum.

Dr. Saghaei's research work extends to a diverse range of areas, such as photonic crystal fibers and waveguides, micro and nanostructures, optical sensors, bio-photonics, and optical communications. He has a strong background in spread spectrum based on OCDMA and is proficient in designing and fabricating a range of optical components, including interferometers such as MZI, MI, and more, branches such as Y and T splitters, couplers such as edge, BDC, GC, and more, resonators such as ring and X, tapers, terminators, buffers, delay lines, Bragg gratings, photonic crystals, logic gates like AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR XNOR, half adder, full adder, subtractor, multi and de-multiplexers, encoders and decoders, high-speed memories, PLA, FPGA, flip flops, and timers, as well as analog to digital converters and digital to analog converters.

Dr. Saghaei has published numerous research papers. Additionally, he is currently involved in the design of basic photonic crystal structures that feature one or more PBGs in TE or TM modes, which can be employed in various applications, including logic gates, optical filters, optical fiber-based components, interferometers, decoders, and encoders, multiplexers and demultiplexers, comparators, converters, adders and subtractors, memory elements, sensors, and timers.