Nikolay I. Zheludev

Deputy Director (Physics) of the Optoelectronics Research Centre
University of Southampton, UK and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Nikolay Zheludev is President’s Professor of Physics and co-Director of the Photonics Institute at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and  Professor of Physics and Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. He is known for his fundamental studies of metamaterials, nanophotonics, toroidal electrodynamic and optical superoscillations. He is Fellow of the Royal Society (UK Academy of Sciences) and a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.  His awards include the Thomas Youngs Medal and the President's Science Award, Singapore.

Title: Molecular level metrology and imaging with topological light and free electrons

We demonstrate dimensional metrology and odometry (detection of change in position over time) with resolution on nanometric to picometric scales by analysing scattering of electrons or topologically structured light from the nanostructures using artificial intelligence. We show how these techniques can be applied to characterization and optimization of nano-opto-mechanical metamaterials and to fundamental studies of the dynamics of thermal motion and the physics of phonons in photonic nanostructures.

Federico Capasso

Professor

John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Federico Capasso is the Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, which he joined in 2003 after 27 years at Bell Labs where his career advanced from postdoctoral fellow to Vice President for Physical Research. He pioneered bandgap engineering leading to many new heterostructure devices including the invention of the quantum cascade laser. He and his group did research on plasmonic and dielectric metasurfaces including the generalized laws of refraction and reflection, flat optics with focus on high performance metalenses and on new methods to generate structured light. He carried out fundamental studies of the Casimir effect including the first measurement of the repulsive Casimir force. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . His awards include the 2021 Yves Medal and Jarus Quinn Prize of the Optical Society, the Balzan Prize for Applied Photonics, the King Faisal Prize, the American Physical Society Arthur Schawlow Prize, the IEEE Edison Medal, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Franklin Institute Wetherill Medal and the Enrico Fermi Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from Lund University, Diderot University and the University of Bologna.

Title: Meta-optics: From Flat Lenses to Cameras and Structured Light

Subwavelength spaced arrays of nanostructures, known as metasurfaces, provide a new basis for recasting optical components into thin planar elements, easy to optically align and control aberrations, leading to a major reduction in system complexity and footprint as well as theintroduction of new optical functions. The planarity of flat optics will lead to the unification of semiconductor manufacturing and lens making, where the planar technology to manufacture computer chips will be adapted to make CMOS compatible metasurface based optical components for high volume markets like cell phones. New polarization sensitive and depth cameras will be discussed. Metasurfaces also offer fresh opportunities for str ucturing light by wavefront engineering. I will discuss spin to total orbital angular momentum (OAM) converters and high OAM lasing, as well as flat devices that enable light’s spin and OAM to evolve, simultaneously, from one state to another along the propagation direction

Giulio Cerullo

Professor
Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory. Prof. Cerullo’s research activity covers a broad area known as “Ultrafast Optical Science”, and concerns on the one hand pushing our capabilities to generate and manipulate ultrashort light pulses, and on the other hand using such pulses to capture the dynamics of ultrafast events in bio-molecules, nanostructures and two-dimensional materials (graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides). He has published more than 450 papers which have received more than 22000 citations (H-index: 78). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the European Physical Society and Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journals Optica, Laser&Photonics Reviews, Scientific Reports, Chemical Physics, Journal of Raman spectroscopy. He is General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018 and the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2020.
 

Title: Ultrafast optical response of two-dimensional materials

Layered materials are solids consisting of crystalline sheets with strong in-plane covalent bonds and weak van der Waals out-of-plane interactions. These materials can be easily exfoliated to a single layer (1L), obtaining two-dimensional (2D) materials with radically novel physico-chemical characteristics compared to their bulk counterparts. The field of 2D materials began with graphene and quickly expanded to include semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). 2D materials exhibit very strong light-matter interaction and exceptionally intense nonlinear optical response, enabling a variety of novel applications in optoelectronics and photonics. This talk will review our studies on the ultrafast non-equilibrium and nonlinear optical response of 2D materials. We will discuss ultrafast carrier and spin dynamics in 2D semiconductors and their heterostructures. We will also show gate-tunable absorption saturation and third-harmonic generation in 1L-graphene and optical parametric amplification in 1L-TMDs.

Remus Nicolaescu

CEO/Co-founder
Pointcloud Inc, USA

Remus Nicolaescu is the Co-founder and CEO of Pointcloud Inc., a San Francisco based startup developing coherent 3D imaging solutions using silicon photonics. In 2017, together with a team at University of Southampton, he co-founded Pointcloud Inc., with the mission to create a versatile three-dimensional imaging platform using silicon photonics integration, that would enable 3D cameras to become as ubiquitous and performant as their 2D counterparts. Prior to Pointcloud he held executive roles with technology companies in the US, Europe and Asia. He started his career at Intel, where he performed pioneering work in silicon photonics: he was part of the team that demonstrated the first >1GHz silicon photonics modulator; he proposed and developed the research leading to the demonstration of optical Raman amplifiers and lasers in silicon photonics. He obtained his Masters and Ph.D. in Physics from University of Bucharest and Texas A&M University respectively, and MBA from INSEAD.

Title: Coherent focal plane arrays in silicon photonics, towards high performance 3D Imaging using LIDAR

Accurate 3D imaging is essential for machines to map and interact with the physical world. While numerous 3D imaging technologies exist, each addressing niche applications with varying degrees of success, none have achieved the breadth of applicability and impact that digital image sensors have achieved in the 2D imaging world. A large-scale, two-dimensional focal plane array of coherent detector pixels operating as a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system could serve as the core of a universal 3D imaging platform. It would enable megapixel resolution, high depth accuracy, immunity to interference from sunlight, as well as the ability to directly measure the velocity of moving objects. This talk will present an overview of architectural implementations of large-scale coherent focal plane arrays, and show results of their operation in a 4D imaging (3D + velocity) system. We will discuss performance characteristics, tradeoffs and design optimization for different applications. Finally, we will discuss future architectural implementations and opportunities for pixel size reduction to enable 10 megapixels and beyond coherent imaging cameras.

Remus Nicolaescu, StevenA.Fortune, Andrew J. Compston, Pointcloud Inc.; Ion E. Opris, Opris Consulting; David J. Thomson, University of Southampton; Christopher Rogers, Alexander Y. Piggott, Alexander Gondarenko, Pointcloud Inc.; Fanfan Meng, Xia Chen, Graham T. Reed, University of Southampton