Plenary Event
OPTO Plenary
On demand | Presented Live 24 January 2022
8:00 AM - 8:05 AM: Welcome and Opening Remarks
OPTO Plenary Session Chair: Ali Adibi, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
8:05 AM - 8:10 AM: Announcement of the IBM-SPIE HBCU Faculty Accelerator Award in Quantum Optics and Photonics
Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, SPIE President, Vanderbilt Univ. (USA)
Kayla Lee, IBM Research (USA)
8:10 AM - 8:50 AM: Frontier Electronics in Memory of Professor Isamu Akasaki
Hiroshi Amano, Nagoya University. (Japan)
ISAMU AKASAKI, special distinguished professor of Meijo University, and distinguished university professor and emeritus professor of Nagoya University, the pioneer of blue LEDs, and the Nobel Laureate in physics, passed away from pneumonia on Thursday, April 1, 2021 at the age of 92. He was always a real pioneer. He started nitride research in 1967. At that time, blue LED research was an undeveloped area. When he moved from Matsushita Giken Co., Ltd. to Nagoya University in 1981, almost no other organizations attempted to continue with the topic. At that time, the majority of researchers determined that it was very difficult to grow single crystals, and that realizing p-type GaN was impossible. Therefore, many abandoned GaN. According to him, his situation at that time was like “going alone in the wilderness.” Today, the wilderness pioneered by Professor Isamu Akasaki is now a prosperous and fruitful field where many researchers all over the world are gathering and bringing happiness to the people. He liked the term “Frontier Electronics.” In this presentation, in addition to his memorial, today’s frontier electronics will be discussed.
Hiroshi Amano received a Doctorate of Engineering from Nagoya University. His supervisor was Prof. Isamu Akasaki. From 1988 to 1992, he was a research associate at Nagoya University. In 1992, he moved to Meijo University from 1998 till 2010. He then moved to Nagoya University, where he was a professor of Graduate School of Engineering in 2010. On Oct. 1, 2015, he became a director of the Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics, Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability, Nagoya University. Prof. Amano shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 with Prof. Isamu Akasaki and Prof. Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources." He is currently developing technologies for the fabrication of high-efficiency power semiconductor development and new energy-saving devices at Nagoya University.
8:50 AM - 9:30 AM: Inverse Designed Integrated Photonics
Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford Univ. (USA)
Despite a great progress in photonics over the past few decades, we are nowhere near the level of integration and complexity in photonic systems that would be comparable to those of electronic circuits, which prevents use of photonics in many applications. This lag in integration scale is in big part a result of how we traditionally design photonics: by combining building blocks from a limited library of known designs, and by manual tuning a few parameters. Unfortunately, the resulting photonic circuits are very sensitive to errors in manufacturing and to environmental instabilities, bulky, and often inefficient. We show how a departure from this old fashioned approach can lead to optimal photonic designs that are much better than state of the art on many metrics (smaller, more efficient, more robust). This departure is enabled by development of inverse design approach and computer software which designs photonic systems by searching through all possible combinations of realistic parameters and geometries. We also show how this inverse design approach can enable new functionalities for photonics, including compact particle accelerators on chip which are 10 thousand times smaller than traditional accelerators, chip-to-chip on on-chip optical interconnects with error free terabit per second communication rates, and quantum technologies.
Jelena Vučković (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She is also the the Fortinet Founders Chair of the electrical engineering department at Stanford, and was the inaugural director of Q-FARM, the Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative. Vučković has received many awards including the James Gordon Memorial Speakership from the OSA (2020), the IET A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize (2019), Distinguished Scholar of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics - MPQ (2019), Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Munich (2013), Humboldt Prize (2010), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2008), and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE in 2007). She is a Fellow of the APS, the Optica (OSA), and of the IEEE.
9:30 AM - 10:10 AM: Robust Nonlinear and Topological Quantum Photonics
Andrea Blanco-Redondo, Nokia Bell Labs. (USA)
In this talk we will discuss how to engineer the dispersion relation of photonic platforms to provide robust propagation of classical and quantum states of light. In the first part, we will unveil how to leverage the interaction of nonlinearity with higher orders of dispersion to create novel types of solitons, wave packets that propagate unperturbed for long distances. These objects have advantageous energy-width scaling laws with respect to conventional nonlinear Schrodinger solitons and show promise for applications in ultrafast lasers and integrated frequency combs. Subsequently, we will cover recent developments in topological quantum photonics. Topological photonics studies topological phases of light and leverages the appearance of robust topological edge states. We will emphasize our experimental demonstration of nonlinearly generated and topologically protected photon pairs and path-entangled biphoton states in silicon waveguide arrays. Further, we will detail our latest experiments demonstrating entanglement between topologically distinct modes, highlighting topology as an entanglement degree of freedom.
Andrea Blanco-Redondo is the Head of the Silicon Photonics Department at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA, where she develops new concepts and applications in nonlinear integrated optics and topological quantum photonics. From 2015 to 2019, she was the Professor Harry Messel Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics of the University of Sydney, Australia. From 2007 to 2015 she was a photonics researcher and a project manager with the Aerospace and Telecom departments of Tecnalia, Spain. She received her PhD in 2014 and MSc in 2007, both in Elec. Eng., at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the University of Valladolid (Spain) respectively. She is an OSA Director at Large and the recipient of the 2018 OSA Ambassador distinction, the 2016 Geoff Opat Award of the Australian Optical Society to the top Australian Early Career Researcher, and of one of the two 2014 Ada Byron Awards to the top Women in Technology in Spain.
OPTO Plenary Session Chair: Ali Adibi, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
8:05 AM - 8:10 AM: Announcement of the IBM-SPIE HBCU Faculty Accelerator Award in Quantum Optics and Photonics
Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, SPIE President, Vanderbilt Univ. (USA)
Kayla Lee, IBM Research (USA)
8:10 AM - 8:50 AM: Frontier Electronics in Memory of Professor Isamu Akasaki
Hiroshi Amano, Nagoya University. (Japan)
ISAMU AKASAKI, special distinguished professor of Meijo University, and distinguished university professor and emeritus professor of Nagoya University, the pioneer of blue LEDs, and the Nobel Laureate in physics, passed away from pneumonia on Thursday, April 1, 2021 at the age of 92. He was always a real pioneer. He started nitride research in 1967. At that time, blue LED research was an undeveloped area. When he moved from Matsushita Giken Co., Ltd. to Nagoya University in 1981, almost no other organizations attempted to continue with the topic. At that time, the majority of researchers determined that it was very difficult to grow single crystals, and that realizing p-type GaN was impossible. Therefore, many abandoned GaN. According to him, his situation at that time was like “going alone in the wilderness.” Today, the wilderness pioneered by Professor Isamu Akasaki is now a prosperous and fruitful field where many researchers all over the world are gathering and bringing happiness to the people. He liked the term “Frontier Electronics.” In this presentation, in addition to his memorial, today’s frontier electronics will be discussed.
Hiroshi Amano received a Doctorate of Engineering from Nagoya University. His supervisor was Prof. Isamu Akasaki. From 1988 to 1992, he was a research associate at Nagoya University. In 1992, he moved to Meijo University from 1998 till 2010. He then moved to Nagoya University, where he was a professor of Graduate School of Engineering in 2010. On Oct. 1, 2015, he became a director of the Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics, Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability, Nagoya University. Prof. Amano shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 with Prof. Isamu Akasaki and Prof. Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources." He is currently developing technologies for the fabrication of high-efficiency power semiconductor development and new energy-saving devices at Nagoya University.
8:50 AM - 9:30 AM: Inverse Designed Integrated Photonics
Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford Univ. (USA)
Despite a great progress in photonics over the past few decades, we are nowhere near the level of integration and complexity in photonic systems that would be comparable to those of electronic circuits, which prevents use of photonics in many applications. This lag in integration scale is in big part a result of how we traditionally design photonics: by combining building blocks from a limited library of known designs, and by manual tuning a few parameters. Unfortunately, the resulting photonic circuits are very sensitive to errors in manufacturing and to environmental instabilities, bulky, and often inefficient. We show how a departure from this old fashioned approach can lead to optimal photonic designs that are much better than state of the art on many metrics (smaller, more efficient, more robust). This departure is enabled by development of inverse design approach and computer software which designs photonic systems by searching through all possible combinations of realistic parameters and geometries. We also show how this inverse design approach can enable new functionalities for photonics, including compact particle accelerators on chip which are 10 thousand times smaller than traditional accelerators, chip-to-chip on on-chip optical interconnects with error free terabit per second communication rates, and quantum technologies.
Jelena Vučković (PhD Caltech 2002) is the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She is also the the Fortinet Founders Chair of the electrical engineering department at Stanford, and was the inaugural director of Q-FARM, the Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative. Vučković has received many awards including the James Gordon Memorial Speakership from the OSA (2020), the IET A. F. Harvey Engineering Research Prize (2019), Distinguished Scholar of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics - MPQ (2019), Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Munich (2013), Humboldt Prize (2010), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2008), and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE in 2007). She is a Fellow of the APS, the Optica (OSA), and of the IEEE.
9:30 AM - 10:10 AM: Robust Nonlinear and Topological Quantum Photonics
Andrea Blanco-Redondo, Nokia Bell Labs. (USA)
In this talk we will discuss how to engineer the dispersion relation of photonic platforms to provide robust propagation of classical and quantum states of light. In the first part, we will unveil how to leverage the interaction of nonlinearity with higher orders of dispersion to create novel types of solitons, wave packets that propagate unperturbed for long distances. These objects have advantageous energy-width scaling laws with respect to conventional nonlinear Schrodinger solitons and show promise for applications in ultrafast lasers and integrated frequency combs. Subsequently, we will cover recent developments in topological quantum photonics. Topological photonics studies topological phases of light and leverages the appearance of robust topological edge states. We will emphasize our experimental demonstration of nonlinearly generated and topologically protected photon pairs and path-entangled biphoton states in silicon waveguide arrays. Further, we will detail our latest experiments demonstrating entanglement between topologically distinct modes, highlighting topology as an entanglement degree of freedom.
Andrea Blanco-Redondo is the Head of the Silicon Photonics Department at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA, where she develops new concepts and applications in nonlinear integrated optics and topological quantum photonics. From 2015 to 2019, she was the Professor Harry Messel Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics of the University of Sydney, Australia. From 2007 to 2015 she was a photonics researcher and a project manager with the Aerospace and Telecom departments of Tecnalia, Spain. She received her PhD in 2014 and MSc in 2007, both in Elec. Eng., at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the University of Valladolid (Spain) respectively. She is an OSA Director at Large and the recipient of the 2018 OSA Ambassador distinction, the 2016 Geoff Opat Award of the Australian Optical Society to the top Australian Early Career Researcher, and of one of the two 2014 Ada Byron Awards to the top Women in Technology in Spain.