Orthogonal Physics Enabled Nanophotonics (OPEN): attojoule optoelectronics, fundamental scaling laws, and analogue optical compute engines.

In nanophotonics we create optical material-systems, which are structured at lengthscales smaller than the wavelength of light. When light propagates inside such sub-diffraction limited waveguide modes or cavities numerous novel and exciting physical phenomena emerge including unity-high index modulation, strong Purcell enhancement, and selective excitonpolariton modifications. However, in order to make use of these opportunities for real-world
applications, one has to have the ability to integrate nanophotonic structures into functional devices, synergistic links and circuits. In this talk, I present some of our recent theoretical and experimental progress in exploring thresholdless lasing, attojoule-per-bit efficient modulators, and plasmonic and Soliton-based switching. Furthermore, I will show fundamental scaling laws of nanophotonic devices and derive a Figure-of-merit for optical information flow. Using the bosonic character of photons we develop in-the-network information processing engines. Here we uniquely map the computational algorithm onto the photonic hardware to demonstrate optical analogue compute engines based on residue arithmetic and neuromorphic computing.
Volker J. Sorger is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the director of the Orthogonal Physics Enabled Nanophotonics (OPEN) lab at the George Washington University. He received his PhD from the University of California Berkeley. His research areas include opto-electronic devices, plasmonics and nanophotonics, including novel materials. Amongst his breakthroughs are the first demonstration of a plasmon laser (Nature 2009), Semiconductor plasmon laser (Nature Mat.) sub-wavelength scale waveguides (Nature Photonics, 2008; Nature Communication, 2011) and Transparent Conductive
Oxides electro-optic modulation (Nanophotonics, 2012; Laser Photonics Reviews, 2015). Dr. Sorger received multiple awards among are the Intel graduate award 2007, SPIE BACUS scholarship 2009, MRS Gold award 2011, AFOSR Young Investigator award 2014, Outstanding Young Researcher Award at GWU 2016, and the Hegarty Innovation Prize 2016. Dr. Sorger is the OSA executive co-chair for technical group development, and member of the Board-of-Meetings at OSA and SPIE. He is the editor-in-chief for the journal "Nanophotonics', CTO of BitGrid LLC, and member of IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and MRS. He is the founder of the photonic-materials subcommittee at the Integrated Photonics Research conference, and served on a task force of the National Photonics Initiative (NPI).