Seminar - Professor Ramy El-Ganainy

Wednesday, June 25, 2014 11:00 am - 11:00 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Speaker

Professor Ramy El-Ganainy
Assistant Professor, Department of Physics
Michigan Technological University

Topic

On-Chip Optical Isolators

Abstract

One of the fundamental issues in laser engineering is protection against reflection from output light. This task is achieved by using optical isolators which are devices that allow only uni-directional light propagation. Currently, the operation of commercial isolators is based on Faraday rotation and thus requires large magnetic fields and bulky magnets.

In this talk, I will present two new techniques for building high performance miniaturized optical diodes.

In the first part of the talk, starting from optical waveguide arrays that mimic Fock space (quantum state with a well-defined particle number) representation of a non-interacting two-site Bose Hubbard Hamiltonian, I will show that introducing magneto-optic nonreciprocity to these structures leads to a superior optical isolation performance. In the forward propagation direction, an input TM polarized beam experiences a perfect state transfer between the input and output waveguide channels while surface Bloch oscillations block the backward transmission between the same ports. The proper operation of these new optical diodes requires small magnetic fields and they can be thus integrated on the same chip with small magnets.

In the second part of the talk, I will present our recent results on utilizing non-Hermitian waveguide arrays (structures with engineered optical gain and loss) that also exhibit Kerr nonlinearity to build polarization-insensitive on-chip optical diodes that do not require magnetic components at all.

Speaker's biography

Ramy El-Ganainy received his PhD, in 2009, from College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), University of Central Florida for his thesis work on nonlinear optical properties of nano-suspensions. In the period from 2009 to 2012, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Physics Department, University of Toronto. He was a guest scientist in the Max Planck Institute for the physics of complex systems in 2013.

In 2013, he joined the department of physics in Michigan Technological University (MTU) as an assistant professor of complex light wave dynamics.

His research interests range from classical optics to computational techniques for radiation-matter interactions. He has published 25 papers and given more than 10 conference presentations.


Invited by Professor S. Safavi-Naeini