I am a Ph.D. candidate in my sixth year at Caltech. My research has been conducted in Professor Oskar Painter's Micro- and Nano-Photonics Research Group, which I joined after a two-year period at a startup-company working in fiber-optical devices and device packaging. Over the course of my Ph.D. research, I have investigated aspects of low-loss microphotonic design, fabrication, and characterization in the silicon and III-V materials systems.
In the past, I worked on extremely high-Q silicon microphotonic devices: fabrication, including surface passivation and preservation; application with rare-earth-doped glass and rare-earth oxides; nonlinear effects in such devices, including cw Raman generation and complex dynamical interactions between free carriers, temperature, and stored optical energy.
Currently, my research is concentrated on methods of coupling light from optical fibers into high-index optical structures, a problem of practical interest in the microphotonics community. Efficient methods of coupling light into and out of high-index optical devices would be useful in the manufacture, testing, and research of photonic devices.
Another area I am working on is that of applying techniques of micro- and nano-fabrication to integrate Silicon and III-V (or other semiconductors) materials in hybrid optical/optoelectronic devices. By combining the excellent light-generation capabilities of III-V materials, the outstanding passive optical properties of silicon (in the near infrared and beyond), and the mature technology of silicon microelectronics, it is expected that flexible, powerful devices could result.
In the future, I hope to apply my experience with design, fabrication, test, modeling, and analytical techniques to optical devices, components, or systems in a research or research and development environment. I am particularly interested in solar generation, electronic/photonic integration, and sensing (bio-, chemo-, etc.) applications.
Current through November 2007
