ALL-OPTICAL CONTROL ON A CHIP

SPEAKER: Prof. Benjamin J. Eggleton, ARC Federation Fellow, CUDOS Director, University of Sydney, AustraliaAbstract: My talk will overview the research highlights of CUDOS, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence. CUDOS is a research consortium between five Australian Universities: The University of Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney, Australian National University and Swinburne University of Technology. The CUDOS research program has two central themes: nanophotonics and nonlinear photonics. Our goal of achieving ultra-high-speed, all-optical signal processing on a single photonic chip is addressed by combining these two themes to develop micron-scale photonic components incorporating nonlinear photonics processes. This talk will review progress on CUDOS flagship projects that represent ambitious cross-node collaborations toward this goal: i) Dispersionless slow light in photonic crystals; (ii) Chalcogenide-based all-optical switching and regeneration schemes based on low-loss waveguides and photonic crystals; and (iii) optofluidic tunable photonic components.Biography: Benjamin Eggleton is currently an ARC Federation Fellow and Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney. He is Director of the Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), an ARC Centre of Excellence. He studied at the University of Sydney, obtaining his BSc (Hons 1) in 1992 and his PhD in Physics in 1996. After graduation, he went to the United States to join Bell Laboratories, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Optical Physics Department. He then transferred to the Optical Fiber Research Department as a Member of Technical Staff and was subsequently promoted to Technical Manager of the Optical Fibre Grating group. Soon after this, he became the Research Director of the Specialty Fiber Business Division of Bell Lab's parent company, Lucent Technologies; here, he drove Lucent's research program in optical fibre devices. He has co-authored more than 180 journal papers, has presented more than 40 invited and plenary presentations at international conferences, and has filed 35 patents. He has received several significant awards. Most notably, in 2004 he received the Prime Minister's Malcolm McIntosh Science Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, in 2003 the ICO Prize (International Commission for Optics), and in 1998 was awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America. Prof Eggleton will be presented with the 2007 Pawsey Medal from the Australian Academy of Sciences. Other achievements include the award of the distinguished lecturer award from the IEEE/LEOS, an R&D100 award, and being made an OSA fellow in 2003. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Photonic Technology Letters, a member of the editorial advisory board for Optics Communications and serves as Vice-President of the Australian Optical Society.Host: Alan Willner, willner@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -108

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher