Dieter H. Bimberg is the Founding Director of the Center of Nanophotonics at TU Berlin. He was chairman of the department of solid state physics at TUB from 1991 to 2012 and was holding the chair of Applied Physics until 2015. Since 2018 he is the director of the “German-Chinese Center for Green Photonics” of CAS at CIOMP Changchun. His research interests include the growth and physics of nanostructures and nanophotonic devices, ultrahigh speed and energy efficient photonic devices for information systems, single/entangled photon emitters for quantum cryptography and ultimate nanoflash memories based on quantum dots. He has authored more than 1500 papers, 36 patents, and 7 books resulting in more than 56,000 citations worldwide and a Hirsch factor of 105 (@ google scholar). His honors include the Russian State Prize in Science and Technology 2001, his election to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2004, to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011, to the American Academy of Engineering in 2014, to the American Academy of Inventors 2016, as Fellow of the American Physical Society and IEEE in 2004 and 2010, respectively, the Max-Born-Award and Medal 2006, awarded jointly by IoP and DPG, the William Streifer Award of the Photonics Society of IEEE in 2010, the UNESCO Nanoscience Award and Medal 2012, Heinrich-Welker-Award 2015 and Nick Holonyak jr. Award of OSA in 2018.

Nanophotonics for a Green Internet

The energy required to transmit information as encoded optical and electrical data bits within and between electronic and photonic integrated circuits, within and between computer servers, within and between data centers, and ultimately nearly instantly across the globe, from any one point to another, must be minimized. This energy spans between typically tens of picojoules-per-bit to well over tens of millijoules-per-bit for the intercontinental distances. We seek to meet the exploding demand for information within the terrestrial resources available but more importantly as a common sense measure to reduce costs and to become stewards of a perpetual Green Internet. The concept of a Green Internet implies a collection of highly energy-efficient, independent, and ubiquitous information systems operating with minimal impact on the environment via natural or sustainable energy sources. A key enabling optical component for the Green Internet is the vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). We review our research work on energy-efficient VCSELs for application as light-sources for optical interconnects and optical fiber data communications between 850 and 1310 nm. We present VCSEL designs, design principles, and operating methods that enable data communication systems capable of error-free operation at bit rates exceeding 50 gigabits-per-second with energy efficiencies approaching 100 fJ-per-bit.
For a review on Green Photonics see: G.Eisenstein and D.Bimberg, eds. „Green Photonics and Electronics”, Springer, Cham 2017

Yidong, Huang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in optoelectronics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1988 and 1994, respectively. From 1991 to 1993, she was with Arai Laboratories, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, on leave from the Tsinghua University. In 1994, she joined the Photonic and Wireless Devices Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation, where she was engaged in the research on semiconductor laser diodes for optical-fiber communication and received “Merit Award” and “Contribution Award” from NEC Corporation in 1997 and 2003, respectively. She joined the Department of Electronics Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2003, as a professor, and be appointed by the Changjiang Project and the National Talents Engineering in 2005 and 2007, respectively. She was Vice Chairman of the Department from 2007-2012 and has been the Chairman of the Department from 2013. She is presently engaged in research on nano-structure optoelectronics. Professor Huang authored/co-authored more than 300 journal and conference papers. She is a senior member of the IEEE, and the deputy member of Director Board of Chinese Optical Society.

Manipulation of Generalized Energy-bands for New Functional Devices

All the optoelectronic devices operate based on the interaction between light and matter. The emergence of the next-generation optoelectronic devices depends on our understanding and discovering of new mechanism of the light-matter interaction. In the last decades or so, a great deal of research and development work has been carried out on the nanophotonics and demonstrated a lot of novel optoelectronic characteristics. It is necessary to go beyond individual devices and search for a more general rule behind each device and phenomenon.

In analogy to the energy-bands of electrons, the energy-momentum relations of other fundamental particles (such as photons), quasi-particles (such as phonons), and polaritons, which are the couple systems among these particles, can be considered as “general energy-bands”. One of the essences of the novel optoelectronic characteristics in nanostructure lies in the ability to manipulate this kind of general energy-bands of various fundamental particles and their associated quasi-particles. This paper summarizes our research work on nanophotonics from the perspective of general energy-bands manipulation. Here the general energy-bands of photon, phonon, and SPP were manipulated by different nanostructures for realizing novel optoelectronic characteristics. We demonstrated an ultra-compact optical switch based on photonic crystal slow light waveguide, a phonon laser with optomechanical crystal nanobeam cavity, and threshold-less Cherenkov radiation in multilayer hyperbolic metamaterial.

Professor Gu is Distinguished Professor and Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor at RMIT University and was a Laureate Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He is an author of four standard reference books and has over 470 publications in nano/biophotonics. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science as well as the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. He is also an elected fellow of the AIP, the OSA, the SPIE, the InstP, and the IEEE. He was President of the International Society of Optics within Life Sciences, Vice President of the Board of the International Commission for Optics (ICO) (Chair of the ICO Prize Committee) and a Director of the Board of the Optical Society of America (Chair of the International Council). He was awarded the Einstein Professorship, the W. H. (Beattie) Steel Medal, the Ian Wark Medal, the Boas Medal and the Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation. Professor Gu was elected as a Foreign Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 2017.

Angular momentum multiplexing of broadband light at a nanoscale

Optical multiplexing—a technique in which multiple individual optical signals encoded in physical dimensions of light, including time, space, wavelength, polarization and angular momentum, are processed in parallel—has played an indispensable role in information optics. The possibility of manipulation of optical angular momentum at the nanoscale is of crucial importance for both fundamental research and many emerging applications. However, it is still fundamentally challenging to achieve on-chip angular momentum multiplexing due to the extrinsic nature of orbital angular momentum associated with a helical wavefront. Here we present an entirely new concept of nanoplasmonic multiplexing of angular momentum through the nonresonant angular momentum mode-sorting sensitivity by nanoring slit waveguides on tightly-confined plasmonic angular momentum modes, leading to on-chip angular momentum multiplexing of ultra-broadband light. This technology provides a horizon for high-capacity nanoscale information optics in telecommunications, quantum information processing, chemical sensing, display and metrology.

Xiaoyi Bao is the Canada Research Chair professor (Tier I) in Fiber Optics and Photonics in Center for Research in Photonics, physics department, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests range from study of nonlinear effects in fibers to design and fabricate the hybrid specialty fiber waveguides to make fiber device, lasers and sensors. She is a fellow of Royal Society of Canada (RSC), OSA and SPIE.

Enabling fiber technology for ultrasensitive sensing, frequency comb and Gbps random number generation

The narrow peak in FBG can be used as a filter and its peak wavelength is sensitive to temperature and strain for sensing purpose. Its peak wavelength dependence on temperature and strain is determined by the refractive index change of SiO2 fiber, which sets the limit for sensing sensitivity due to the spectral resolution detection ability to detect wavelength shift. There are two approaches to enhance this sensitivity: to change the materials of the fiber and to vary the waveguide property via mode change. To achieve both targets we designed the dual As2Se3 core with PMMA as cladding that support super-modes to form high contrast dual mode interferometer, which is then inscribed with the photosensitive gratings to enhance index modulation and coupling and leading to broadband phase matching condition, so that dispersion can be used as a new sensing parameter. Such design brings unique features of ultrahigh temperature sensitivity, multi-parameter sensing, and larger strain range.

Enhancing light scatterings in optical fibers by random index periods can lead to broadband grating, the irregular periods with uneven index modulations forms local interference pattern within random fiber grating length (a few centimeters). This provides distinct feature due to multiple Rayleigh scattering instead of in-phased reflection in standard FBGs. Such grating can be used as feedback to manipulate laser coherence and modes to create Gb/s random number generation, simultaneous high order Stokes waves lasing creates frequency comb, tunable microwave generation; and multi-parameter sensing based on different spectral section of the random gratings.