EE 4thyr Projects 2015/2016
Project Title:	Graphene activated silicon based photonic crystal nano-cavities for ultra-fast optical modulators
Supervisor:	Nicolae Coriolan Panoiu		Submitted on: Thursday 9th April 2015

Within the past few years we have witnessed a rapidly increasing interest in the properties of light interaction with deep sub-wavelength structures, primarily because of the exciting technological applications that are emerging in this area of nano-photonics. In particular, photonic crystal nanostructures can be used to achieve light localization at deep sub-wavelength scale, which can have important nano-photonics applications, including chip-scale optical sources, ultra-compact sensors and quantum signal processing. A challenging problem in this area of research is to develop tuneable, ultra-fast photonic nanodevices whose properties can be controlled optically. One promising approach to achieve ultra-fast all-optical tuneability of photonic nanodevices is to incorporate graphene layers into their structure. In particular, by varying the charge density in the graphene layers one can tune their interaction with the photonic nano-devices and thus achieve ultra-fast optical response of the combined photonic system.

The student involved in this research project will study the optical properties of graphene activated photonic crystal nano-cavities. For this, we will use computational methods that allow one to characterize the spectral properties of such nanostructures (e.g., by computing the reflectivity and absorption spectra), as well as the time dynamics of the optical field interacting with these structures. Finally, the potential use of this new class of photonic nano-devices to photonic systems with enhanced functionality (e.g., optical filters and modulators) will also be explored.

Requirements: This is a computational project. A fair understanding of Electromagnetic theory and related concepts as well as proficiency in Matlab is required for this project.