About the Lab

Silicon is an ideal material system for integrated optics at telecommunications wavelengths. Silicon's extremely high refractive index and low loss make it possible for silicon waveguides to confine optical modes to sub-diffraction-limited areas. We can gain control of photons on the nanometer scale, and can force strong interactions with nonlinear waveguide claddings. Taking advantage of these capabilities, it is possible to integrate femtosecond-scale nonlinear optical functionality into silicon chip-scale devices.

We're interested in using the silicon photonics platform both to build interesting and important optical devices, and to explore new physical phenomena. Our projects span the space between very applied work on devices like ultra-low voltage electrooptic modulators, to interest in chip-scale nonlinear and quantum optics for novel light sources and all-optical logic circuits.