IMT Talk : Micro- and Nanoscale Photonic Integrated Transducers

Abstract:  

The field of integrated transducers has experienced tremendous progress over the past decades, with micromachined sensors and actuators having seamlessly integrated into our daily lives, among others reshaping the way we interact with our personal digital devices, providing a reliable and secure backbone of our fiber-optical telecommunication network, or enabling devices for the continuous monitoring of our personal health. In particular, the combination of photonics with micro- and nanofabrication engineering has been widely recognized to provide unique opportunities for miniaturized high performance systems and to allow exploring novel concepts in photonic integrated transducers. In this talk, we will :

(1) introduce the exceptional performance of photonic integrated transducers, which benefit from the precision achieved by exploring fabrication methods and physics at the micro- and nanoscale, at the example of a smart slit demonstrator for advanced spectroscopy in space-borne spectrometers. Taking advantage of the recent progress in further miniaturization in photonic integrated circuits, we will then

(2) discuss the expectation on photonic integrated transducers to play a pivotal role in matching the increased need for bandwidth in fiber-optic telecommunication and datacenter infrastructure. Indeed, modern fiber-optical communication systems rely on photonic integrated transducers, to attenuate, shape, filter or redirect optical signals, and we will demonstrate, how we can exploit surface micromachined electro-mechano-photonic transducers for next generation fully integrated optical circuit switching solutions. Advances in integration allow at the same time to envision entirely novel concepts. Consequently, we will

(3) motivate scaling and system level integration approaches towards large circuits, and introduce the concept of the photonic equivalent to electronic field-programmable gate arrays. While current photonic integrated circuit technology platforms typically rely on electro-thermal, plasma-dispersion, or electro-optical transduction, we follow in the collaborative H2020 project Morphic our unique route to introduce Nano-Opto-Electromechanical Systems into standard silicon photonics to leverage the potential for large-scale, low-power reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits e.g. for the use in physical implementations of photonic tensor core units. Finally, we will

(4) summarize highlights of our recent experimental progress and outline the roadmap for establishing future photonic integrated transducers in diamond, as an illustration how we can leverage novel material integration and nanofabrication approaches to engineer solutions for emerging applications including photonic integrated transducers for quantum sensing or quantum information processing in diamond integrated photonics.

Biography:

Niels Quack received the M. Sc. degree from EPFL in 2005, and the Dr. Sc. degree from ETH Zürich in 2010.  From 2011 to 2015 he was postdoctoral researcher and visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, within the Integrated Photonics Laboratory at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. From 2014 to 2015 he was Senior MEMS Engineer with Sercalo Microtechnology, leading manufacturer of MEMS based components for fiber-optical telecommunications. Since 2015 he is SNSF Assistant Professor at EPFL, leading the research group on Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems. His research focus aligns micro- and nanofabrication engineering with the physics at the micro- and nanoscale and system level integration for integrated transducer systems, addressing emerging and future applications in telecommunications, quantum information processing and sensing, imaging and artificial intelligence. He is senior member of IEEE, member of OSA and SPIE, and holds associate editor appointments for the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems (JMEMS)  and the SPIE Journal of Optical Microsystems (JOM). He serves on the Steering Committee for the IEEE International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics (OMN), and has served as General Chair for IEEE OMN 2018 and the 2019 Symposium Latsis on Diamond Photonics.