Our group's research is focused on the study of integrated optical devices and systems, including both linear and nonlinear phenomena. Current research areas include silicon photonics, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and optical signal processing.

Silicon Photonics

The study of nanophotonic devices and systems on CMOS compatible material platforms is largely driven by industry efforts to overcome the electronics bottleneck. Devices which have sub-micron feature sizes enable interesting dispersive and wavelength selective behavior to come about. Such devices are critical building blocks for larger scale optical interconnect systems which have applications in microprocessors, data centers and telecommunications.

Nonlinear Optics

Nonlinear optical phenomena is highly dependent on properties of the host material. Materials with a high nonlinear refractive index and which can be easily fabricated into integrated waveguide devices are central to our study of nonlinear optical phenomena. Aside from the development of high nonlinear figure of merit, CMOS-compatible platforms, our research aims to harness these towards the study of nonlinear effects in nanophotonic structures, photonic crystals, gratings and microresonators. Research in this domain has yielded high spectro-temporal compression systems, advanced the Science of on-chip Bragg solitons and enabled observations of topological optical parametric amplification and topologically protected parametric wavelength conversion.

Quantum Photonics

Silicon-based photonic integrated circuits are important for the implementation of future quantum optical systems. Aside from providing integrated components such as splitters, filters and efficient couplers for the manipulation of light on a chip, such circuits may also be used for the generation of photon pairs using spontaneous four-wave mixing. This area of our research aims to develop integrated photonic devices which enable efficient photon-pair generation as well as low loss devices for the efficient manipulation of photons.