Integrated nanophotonics using functional materials

Photonics is a fast moving field that as witnessed some incredible progress over the last few years. This has been due to advances in nanofabriocation technology, better modeling tools as well as a hige surge in interest driven by the quest for greater speed and bandwidth of processing for emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. Photonics use light as the information carrier and thus cam make use of the parallel information transfer that fibre optic cables currently do in telecommunications. However, in order to achieve that, such components must be integrated onto silicon chips and then processing requires that these chips be able to manipulate and route this light dynamically. As of now, in spite of huge advances, such a combined photonic chip is still some distance away from being realized. This project will address one major aspect of this using functional materials - whilst silicon is a good functional material for electronics (because it can be differentially doped and thus create functions such as switches), this does not translate well into optics. Thus optics requires an entirely different group of functional materials. Our group is one of the leaders in exploring this space, particularly with chalcogenide based phase change materials, an Yi's project will look into novel functional materials to achieve routing and switching operations on a chip.
This is a novel area of research, especially as functional routing will enable not only computing applications, but also a host of other applications within photonics that require processing of light signals. Thus, it not only aligns to several of EPSRC's current strategies and research areas well (AI and Robotics, Engineering, ICT and Manufacturing). This project would fall mostly within the EPSRC Engineering research area.