Guest lecture: Microcavity Lasers for the Information Age

Rescheduled event

The Optical Society of America (OSA) Student Chapter will present guest lecturer Kent D. Choquette of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Urbana-Champaign, who will speak on the subject "Microcavity Lasers for the Information Age."

The event will be Tuesday, April 15, at Dreese Laboratories Room 260.

Abstract
The emergence of photonics, where light rather than electricity is manipulated, is posed to further advance the Information Age. Central to the photonic revolution is the development of miniature laser sources. This presentation will review vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) which have been deployed by the billions for optical interconnect and sensing applications. We describe new microcavity lasers with enhanced performance for the next generation of digital communication applications, as well as coherently coupled VCSEL arrays which are viable candidates for high radiance and optical beam steering applications. Beam steering with coherent VCSEL arrays offers a fundamentally different approach because the array acts as both the source and phase shifting mechanism, allowing maximum compactness and electro-optical efficiency. We show the optical interaction is based on a temporal phase shift between array elements at the quantum well active region which enables record-high beam steering speeds and phase sensitivity to current injection.

Bio
Kent D. Choquette received B.S. degrees in Engineering Physics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado-Boulder and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held a postdoctoral appointment at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and then joined Sandia National Laboratories as a Principle member of technical staff in Albuquerque, NM. In 2000 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois and is currently the Able Bliss Professor of Engineering. Professor Choquette has authored more than 250 technical publications and five book chapters, and has presented numerous invited talks and tutorials. He has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, IEEE Photonic Technology Letters, and Journal Lightwave Technology, as well as a Guest Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics. He was awarded the 2012 OSA Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, the 2008 IEEE/Photonics Society Engineering Achievement Award, and the 2013 IEEE/Photonics Society Distinguished Service Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of SPIE, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.