Optomechanics has witnessed its great success in detecting the first ever gravitational waves produced by collision and merger of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away, which confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window on the universe. Optomechanical systems have shown their unique advantages in fundamental research as well as practical applications in high-precision metrology, signal processing, and data communication. Optomechanical devices exhibit many variations with their sizes and mechanical masses spanning orders of magnitude. Going to the other end of the spectrum, The speaker will talk about his research group’s experimental research of integrated nanoscale optomechanical and optoelectromechanical devices with pico/femtogram masses and gigahertz vibrational frequencies. These integrated devices hold great promise for many burgeoning areas in science and engineering, such as single-molecule detection, laser cooling, and quantum information processing.
About the speaker
Prof Xiankai Sun received his PhD degree in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology in 2010. From 2010 to 2014, he worked in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University first as a Postdoctoral Associate and then as an Associate Research Scientist. In 2014, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor. His current research focuses on photonic and optomechanical nanodevices for new fundamental and practical applications.
Prof Sun’s graduate work was recognized by numerous professional societies, including the IEEE Photonics Society, the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans, and SPIE. He was recognized as a finalist of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in 2013 by New York Academy of Sciences for his contribution to “experimental research of nanoscale optomechanical systems.” He also received the Early Career Award from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong in 2015. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of Optics Express.
