Marin Soljacic (MIT)

Date: Thu. November 18th, 2021, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Location: Via Zoom

Enabling novel light phenomena at the subwavelength scale

By nano-structuring materials at length scales smaller than the wavelength of light, one can create effective materials, exhibiting optical properties unparalleled in any naturally occurring materials. This talk will present our work in three areas of research that have recently been of particular interest to the nanophotonics community: plasmonics, topology, and artificial intelligence. First, via plasmonics, one can spatially confine light by orders of magnitude compared to light confinement in regular materials; conventional Maxwell’s equations are no longer suitable for modelling this regime. Second, many of the exciting phenomena in topological physics can also be observed in nanophotonics, including: Chiral Edge States, Weyl points, Fermi arcs, etc. Third, numerical simulations of nanophotonics phenomena can often reproduce real experiments very closely: this makes nanophotonics a great training-ground for developing and studying new AI algorithms for science.