Events Calendar

EE-EP Faculty Candidate - Owen Miller, Friday, February 5th at 2:00pm in EEB 132

Speaker: Owen Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Design at the Nanoscale: Reaching the Limits of Wave-Matter Interactions

Abstract: Nanoscale devices are emerging for an increasing variety of technological applications. Photonics will play a critical role, and within three areas - photovoltaics, nanoparticle scattering, and radiative heat transfer - I will show how large-scale computational optimization and rigorous analytical frameworks enable rapid search through large design spaces, and spur discovery of fundamental limits to interactions between light and matter.

In photovoltaics, the famous ray-optical 4n^2 limit to absorption enhancement has for decades served as a critical design goal, and it motivated the use of quasi-random textures in commercial solar cells. I will show that at subwavelength scales, non-intuitive, computationally designed textures outperform random ones, and can closely approach the 4n^2 limit. Pivoting to metallic structures, where there has not been an analogous "4n^2" limit, I will show how energy-conservation principles lead to fundamental limits to the optical response of metals, answering a long-standing question about the tradeoff between resonant enhancement and material loss. The limits were stimulated by a computational discovery in nanoparticle optimization, where I will present theoretical designs and experimental measurements (by a collaborator) approaching the upper bounds of absorption and scattering. The energy-conservation principles can be extended to the emerging field of radiative heat transfer, where they generalize the ray-optical concept of a "blackbody" to the nanoscale.

Biography: Dr. Owen Miller is a postdoctoral research associate in MIT Applied Math, working with Steven Johnson. He received his PhD in 2012 from UC Berkeley, where he was advised by Eli Yablonovitch and selected as an NSF Graduate Fellow. He received bachelor's degrees in EE and physics from the Univ. of Virginia in 2007. His research interests center around leveraging large-scale computational optimization and theoretical analysis for nanoscale devices, especially for emerging energy applications.

Host: EE-EP

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Marilyn Poplawski