NSF-SIAM Optics and Photonics Workshop

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The Principal Investigator will organize the "NSF-SIAM Optics and Photonics Workshop" which will be held as part of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in Boston, MA, July 11-15, 2016. Advances in our understanding of the behavior of light are necessary both for improvements on current technologies and for the realization of new and envisioned technologies. These technologies influence directly a variety of sectors in our society, including communications, defense and national security, energy, and medicine. Due to recent advances in computational tools, materials science, and nanostructure fabrication, mathematicians have a larger role than ever to play in this field. This workshop will allow leading applied mathematicians to bring their vision of the future of mathematics in optics and photonics to a large mathematical audience. The meeting will encourage collaborations among researchers in this field from a diverse set of scientific backgrounds, and the majority of the funding will be devoted to supporting the participation of early career researchers and applied mathematicians from underrepresented groups. The workshop will take place completely on the first day of the SIAM Annual Meeting, Monday, July 11, 2016, and will feature several accomplished applied mathematicians in the field of optics and photonics. The talks will survey the field and its open problems for the broader applied mathematics community. Topics that will be covered include (1) research on light-matter interaction, including low-loss metamaterials, plasmonics, and quantum phenomena; (2) multiphysics coupling between classical electromagnetic and quantum mechanical phenomena; (3) the science of light propagation and imaging through scattering, dispersive, and turbulent media, which encompasses advances in radiative transport theory, statistical inverse theory, numerical inversion methods, simulation models, and hybrid imaging models; (4) nonlinear photonics and the interplay between nonlinearity and randomness. Representatives from the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences will be present to discuss and answer questions about the new NSF program in Optics and Photonics. The conference will be advertised through the SIAM annual meeting website at http://www.siam.org/meetings/an16/workshops.php