IEEE SF Bay Area MEMS and Sensor Chapter Presents:

Microresonator-based Optical Frequency Combs: New Material Platforms

Abstract:

Optical frequency combs have empowered scientists to measure frequency and time with fractional accuracy better than 10-17 (more accurately than any other quantity), functioning as rulers in frequency (an equally-spaced array of laser frequencies) and in time (i.e., a train of short light pulses). However, they are currently expensive, bulky, and bound to the laboratory. Even the application scope of lasers, which have found their way into every aspect of our lives, remains limited wherever highly coherent and stable lasers are required; there are technologically and scientifically important wavelength windows where lasers and frequency combs are non-existent. The possibility of surmounting these limitations is now on the horizon with remarkable recent advancements in nonlinear integrated photonics. Particularly, microresonator-based frequency comb (microcomb) generation has proven one of the most successful and applicable areas of photonics in the past decade, with promising application demonstrations, albeit mainly centered on the telecommunications C-band, in such varied areas as high-bitrate coherent optical communication, low-phase-noise radio frequency (RF) and microwave signal generation, spectroscopic sensing, precision navigation and time-keeping, and search for exoplanets. I will provide an overview of the physics and applications of microcombs with focus on recent theoretical and experimental results of my lab at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), aimed at the demonstration of stable power-efficient microcombs for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical communication, and in new frequency windows for target applications in atomic optical clocks, spectroscopy, and medical imaging.

Speaker’s Bio:

Hossein Taheri is an assistant research professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Prior to joining UCR, he was an R&D engineer at Foxconn Optical Interconnect Technology (later Broadcom Inc.) in San Jose CA, working on highbit- rate datacenter fiber optic modules and optical transceivers. Since 2017, he has also been a consulting scientist with Bioxytech Retina Inc., a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area utilizing optical techniques for non-invasive early detection of eye diseases. In 2016, he was a research scientist at OEwaves Inc. in Pasadena CA, a JPL NASA spin-off company focused on microwave photonics and the first in the world to commercialize microresonator-based optical frequency comb products. He received his master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering with minor in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA, and his bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Tehran.

6:30 – 7:00 PM Networking & Food ($5 Donation)

7:00 – 8:00 PM Invited Talk

8:00 – 8:30 PM AdCom Meeting