Controlling the flow of light is fundamental to optical applications. With the recent advances in nanofabrication capabilities and new theoretical concepts, ground breaking platforms for the nanoscale manipulation of light have been demonstrated in recent years. These include metal-based plasmonic and metasurface structures, which offer unique optical features such as sub-wavelength field confinement, unusual optical constants and advanced wavefront shaping. In this talk, the speaker will present his group’s recent development on the use of tunable semiconducting materials, transparent conducting oxides, to demonstrate an efficient nanoscale plasmonic modulator (PlasMOStor) that operates via solid-state MOS field-effect dynamics, and an electrically tunable metasurfaces that can tune the optical phase and amplitude for on-chip beam steering devices. A phase shift of π and ~ 30% change in the reflectance are achieved by applying 2.5 V gate bias, a basic requirement for electrically tunable beam-steering phased array metasurfaces. The speaker will also discuss the study of “nanostructured”-optical fibers that provide a promising unique platform with controllable optical dispersion and long interaction lengths for the investigation of various sciences, such as photochemistry, biosensing, and nonlinear optics.
About the speaker
Prof Howard Lee received his MPhil in Electronic Engineering at City University of Hong Kong in 2008 and his PhD in Physics from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany in 2012. He then joined the California Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science. In 2015, he moved to Baylor University and is currently an Assistant Professor in Physics. He is also a Fellow in the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Prof Lee’s research focuses on developing new methods, including novel active materials and nanostructures, to actively control the optical properties of nano-optical structures (e.g. plasmonics and metamaterials) for studying new optical physics and light-matter interaction at the nanometer scale, as well as advancing novel optical components with new functionality.
Prof Lee is the recipient of the Croucher Postdoctoral Fellowship and his work on nano-optics, plasmonics and photonic crystals has led to publications in various journals such as Science, Nano Letters, Advanced Materials, Optics Letters and Applied Physics Letters, as well as 70 conference papers.
The seminar is free and open to all. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Please refer to the program website http://iasprogram.ust.hk/wfm/ for details.
