DLS: Michal Lipson - The Revolution of Silicon Photonics

In the past decade the photonic community witnessed a complete transformation of optics. We went from being able to miniaturize a handful of devices to being able to define and control the flow of light using thousands of monolithically integrated optical components – all on a silicon chip. The main drive for silicon photonics is the ability to transmit and manipulate ultra high bandwidth with low power dissipation. Today there are hundreds of products being developed and commercialized towards this goal.

The field of silicon photonics is rapidly evolving and is now enabling completely new applications, ranging from Lidar to biomedical devices. This is partly due to the development of novel chip-scale technologies, novel devices and novel materials compatible with silicon photonics. Many of these technologies and devices can manipulate light across the whole VIS, IR and the Mid IR spectrum. I will discuss these emerging applications, as well as the advancement brought by these novel devices and materials.

The key challenges of the field relate to the scalability of the systems in bandwidth, size and power. Some of these challenges are fundamental and require innovations that break traditional tradeoffs. Novel approaches for switching, modulating and amplifying light have emerged that can open the door to applications that rely on such scalable systems. Michal Lipson describes the challenges of the field and some of the recent innovations that can potentially address these challenges.

The Distinguished Lecturer Series brings leading minds from all areas relevant to the science of light to MPL in Erlangen. It presents the unique opportunity for scientific exchange with the speakers to a broad audience.

The topics range from terahertz optics with graphene, over self-organising proteins to particle accelerators on a chip. One special highlight will be the talk of the Canadian optical physicist Donna Strickland, Nobel laureate of 2018.

All lectures will start at 15.00 CET and will be transmitted via stream. If you would like to attend, please register here for our DLS newsletter:

https://mpl.mpg.de/newsletter/​

You will then receive the link for the zoom conference by e-mail shortly before the presentation.

Click here for an overview of all the lectures:

https://mpl.mpg.de/news-events/dls/​

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