Photonic crystals: Slow light and Nanocavities

When?

Thursday 24 February 2011, 13:00

Where?

02ATI002

Open to:

Staff, Students

Speaker:

Professor Thomas Krauss, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews

Controlling light on the nanoscale is an equally exciting and challenging goal, and it allows us to strongly enhance light-matter interactions. Photonic crystals offer such control; we can slow light down, confine it to wavelength-scale spaces and even change its colour. These abilities are enabled by the careful engineering of photonic crystal's dispersive properties and their nanofabrication.

I will discuss several examples of devices such as ultrasmall photonic switches, harmonic, parametric and adiabatic wavelength conversion in waveguides and cavities and even the strong confinement of light in air, all enabled by the photonic crystal toolkit.