Integrated photonics promises to transform a wide range of applications including optical communication, quantum information processing, and biosensing. Integrated photonics combines photonic signal transmission, processing, and possible conversion to/from an electrical signal on a nanofabricated chip. These nanoscale photonic circuits are not only smaller, but also faster and more efficient compared to traditional electronic circuits. NanoES research in this area is geared towards large-scale integrated networks of photonic devices for cutting edge optical communication and quantum computing as well as single photonic devices for biosensing in health-related diagnostics.
An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Washington, led by Arka Majumdar, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics, was awarded $3.6 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to use meta-optics to develop a dramatically smaller endoscope that can image previously inaccessible areas of the heart and brain.
Researchers at the UW and Princeton University have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on metasurfaces fabricated at Washington Nanofabrication Facility to produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in Nature Communications.
Tunoptix, a Seattle-based optics startup co-founded by University of Washington electrical and computer engineering professors Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar, received a $1,500,000 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from NASA to advance their meta-optics imaging systems.
A multi-institutional research team led by NanoES faculty members Mo Li, Arka Majumdar and Karl Böhringer is developing a powerful, miniaturized optical control engine, called PEAQUE, which will greatly increase capacity and speed of quantum computers.
The National Science Foundation has announced it will fund a new endeavor to bring atomic-level precision to the devices and technologies that underpin much of modern life, and will transform fields like information technology in the decades to come. The five-year, $25 million Science and Technology Center grant will found the Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand — or IMOD — a collaboration of scientists and engineers at 11 universities led by the University of Washington.
The five-year award will provide $650,000 of funding to support Yankowitz’s research investigating and controlling novel topological states of matter in twisted van der Waals heterostructures.
NanoES faculty member and ECE Professor Mo Li is part of a multi-institutional research team, which has received a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new type of computer chip that uses laser light for AI and machine learning computation.
A UW team led by Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar has developed a tunable lens made of metasurfaces and actuated by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
A UW research team led by associate professor Mo Li has developed an optical computing system that could contribute toward speeding up AI and machine learning while reducing associated energy and environmental costs.
Some of the most ambitious goals in physics and materials research are to make ordinary-sounding objects with extraordinary properties: wires that can transport power without any energy loss, or quantum computers that can perform complex calculations that today’s computers cannot achieve. And the emerging workbenches for the experiments that gradually move us toward these goals are 2D materials — sheets of material that are a single layer of atoms thick.