A recurring desire within nanophotonics is to control light-matter interactions by engineering material systems and nanostructures that can confine light within subwavelength volumes. In this seminar, I will present some of our recent works where we engineer both material systems and photonic structures to design complex photonic devices with different functionalities. In the first half of this talk, I will present our works on light-matter coupled polaritonic metasurfaces where we integrate photonic structures with quantum engineered resonant nonlinearities in III-V semiconductor heterostructures to achieve all-dielectric metasurfaces with record high nonlinear response for nonlinear and quantum light generation [1, 2]. In the second half, I will present our ongoing efforts in silicon photonics where we have designed disorder-based complex photonic devices and optical computing architectures for low power and ultrafast image and data processing for remote sensing applications [3].

[1] R. Sarma et. al., “An All-Dielectric Polaritonic Metasurface with Giant Second-Order Nonlinear Response”, Nano Letters 22 (3), 896 (2022).

[2] R. Sarma et. al., “Strong Coupling in All-Dielectric Intersubband Polaritonic Metasurfaces”, Nano Letters 21 (1), 367 (2021).

[3] X. Wang, B. Redding, N. Karl, C. Long, Z. Zhu, S. Pang, D. Brady, R. Sarma, “Integrated photonic encoder for terapixel image processing”, arXiV : 2306.04554

Biography:

Raktim Sarma is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories.  He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Yale University in 2017 and then joined Sandia National Labs first as a postdoctoral fellow and then continued as a Senior Member of Technical Staff. At Sandia, his research concentrates on designing complex nanophotonic devices for various applications ranging from designing voltage tunable filters, ultrathin nonlinear and quantum light sources, to optical devices for low power image processing. Dr. Sarma has authored and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journals and conference papers and has served on several conference committees and review boards.