Speaker: Shoufeng Lan, Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title: Metaphotonics: Tailored Functionalities by Artificial Structuring
Abstract: Discovery of new materials or new technologies designates a new era, for instance, the Bronze age and the Iron age. At the turn of this century, a new technology emerged to design materials by artificially arranging structures at a subwavelength scale. This technology has largely extended materials space beyond the scope of natural materials. Exploring these areas is of great importance for both fundamental physics and practical applications. In this talk, I will share with you some of my recent research on this exciting frontier in optics and photonics. First, I will introduce the concept of artificial structuring for exotic materials and properties such as the invisibility cloak. And then, I will push the boundary of feature size to the atomic limit by using two-dimensional materials as the building blocks. The interplay of chirality and magnetism in this system could lead to a controllable enantiomeric excess that is important for asymmetry synthesis and medicine manufacturing. After that, I will extend nonlinear optics to artificial structures and tackle a fundamental question of whether artificially induced properties still follow the conventional optical rules. The results provide the first experimental evidence for the long-standing prediction of backward phase-matching in negative-index materials. Last, but not least, I will share with you a reward-winning design of artificial structures for a demanding application of augmented reality on contact lenses. With optical functionalities by design, it is arguably safe to say that the photonics enters a new era named “metaphotonics.”
Bio: Dr. Shoufeng Lan is a postdoc fellow working with Prof. Xiang Zhang at the University of California, Berkeley on the fundamental study of light-matter interactions at small scales. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a Physics minor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked on engineered nanostructures for the development of devices that simultaneously support optical and electrical functionalities. In recognition of his multidisciplinary accomplishments, he has received many prestigious awards including but not limited to the Materials Research Society’s graduate student medal (2015), SPIE: The International Society for Optics and Photonics’ D.J. Lovell scholarship (2016), and Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Honor Society’s best Ph.D. thesis award (2018).
ECpE Seminar Host: Jay Kim