Grad students Adam Bottomley, Alireza Aleali and Yule Xiong have been awarded $3,000 scholarships from the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).
Bottomley, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry, will use his scholarship to pursue his photonics research in collaboration with Drs. Jacques Albert and Winnie Ye from the Department of Electronics.
“Most of my research is focused on the properties of silver nanocubes, which are just very tiny cubes made out of ordinary silver metal,” says Bottomley. “The special properties of these tiny metal cubes comes from the fact that they are so small they interact with visible light very strongly, essentially trapping the light in the cube. I am working with Dr. Albert to use these cubes and optic fibers to produce a powerful versatile sensing platform, and with Dr. Ye in an attempt to increase the efficiency of thin film solar cells.”
Aleali and Xiong are both members of Dr. Ye’s Micro/NanoPhotonics Group. Their silicon photonics research with Dr. Ye and collaborators at the National Research Council Canada is aimed at utilizing existing fabrication facilities to provide much faster and cheaper optical telecom devices.
Aleali, a master’s student, is working on an efficient optical modulation device that encodes digital data on a stream of light, using what’s called Pockels effect in Silicon.
Explains Aleali: “Essentially it converts an electrical signal to an optical signal which can then travel with speed of light across the room, the city, or the world. We expect this research will be used in next generation telecom and datacom networks.”
Xiong, a PhD candidate, is focusing on designing novel photonic devices based on silicon photonic platforms. The devices can manipulate the light in the submicron scale, which is useful for sensing biomolecules.
The International Society for Optics and Photonics is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The society serves more than 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.
