I-Corps: Composite Photonics

University Of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell MA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project lies in addressing the needs of the rapidly developing materials science, optics, photonics, and telecommunications industries. Collectively, optics and photonics touch almost every part of modern life. Further development in these industries requires efficient design and utilization of ever-more-complex materials and interfaces. The proposed project has potential to address this fundamental need by enabling quick and efficient characterization, design, and optimization of complex structured media. With new materials and interfaces at hand, optics and photonics companies will have potential to, for example, drastically improve resolution of microscopes, improve the performance of radars and telescopes, develop new sources of light (lasers, LEDs), new routers of light (filters, reflectors, diffusers), new absorbers and detectors of electromagnetic radiation (CCDs, solar cells), as well as new active optical components (such as touch screens and displays). The intellectual merit of this I-Corps project is aimed at understanding the commercialization potential of a powerful proprietary software package. The versatile software allows for rapid and accurate calculation of transmission, reflection, absorption, and scattering of complex periodic composite structured materials and interfaces such as diffractive gratings, photonic crystals, and metamaterials. In the recent fundamental science studies the developed codes were used to (i) design and optimize new high resolution and high-speed microscopy that can be potentially used to characterize nanoparticles and viruses, (ii) understand optical response of new structured interfaces that have ultra-high transparency combined with conductance comparable to that of copper wires, (iii) new diffractive structures for steering and guiding of light. The research has demonstrated that there exists a large class of materials and interfaces, where the software package is orders-of-magnitude faster and more accurate than commercially available finite-elements and finite-difference software.