Nanophotonics presents new opportunities for photonic design in diverse applications, ranging from solar energy conversion and chip-based lightwave circuits to tunable plasmonic elements for CMOS imaging and information display applications. Progress in understanding resonant subwavelength structures has fueled an explosion of interest in both fundamental processes and nanophotonic devices. Plasmonic and dielectric nanostructures have enabled new color and hyperspectral filter designs for megapixel CMOS imaging systems. Photovoltaics technology is now the world’s largest optoelectronic industry, with an annual production capacity of >60GW. We discuss nanophotonic design approaches for next-generation silicon and tandem photovoltaics that go beyond today’s solar cells by the use light trapping and spectrum-splitting optics. Achieving electronic tunability of the optical properties is also an emerging opportunity for information display and thermal management. While the optical properties of photonic and plasmonic nanostructures are typically fixed at the time of fabrication, gated field effect tuning of the carrier density enables the optical dispersion to be altered, yielding new actively materials with electrically tunable absorption, radiative emission and scattering properties. Finally, while photons and plasmons are usually described in a classical electromagnetic theory context, under single photon excitation, quantum coherent states can emerge. We demonstrate entanglement or coherent superposition states of single photons and plasmons using quantum interference in chip-based optical circuits.

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Bio

Harry Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Atwater currently serves as Director of the DOE Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, and is also Director of the Resnick Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, Caltech’s largest endowed research program. Atwater’s scientific interests have two themes: photovoltaics and solar energy as well as plasmonics and optical metamaterials. His group has created new high efficiency solar cell designs, and have developed principles for light management in solar cells. Atwater is an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He has authored or co-authored more than 400 publications cited in aggregate > 31,000 times and his group’s advances in the solar energy and plasmonics field have been reported in Scientific American, Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics and Advanced Materials.
He is co-founder and chief technical advisor for Alta Devices, a venture-backed company in Santa Clara, CA, that holds the current world record for 1 Sun single junction solar cell efficiency and that is currently transitioning high efficiency/low cost GaAs photovoltaics technology to manufacturing and large-scale production. He serves as Editor in Chief for the journal ACS Photonics, and is Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, and in 2006 he founded the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics, which he served as chair in 2008.

Harry Atwater is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, and Member of US National Academy of Engineering. Atwater has been honored by awards, including: (2014) Julius Springer Prize in Applied Physics, (2014) ISI Highly Cited Researcher, (2013) Fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, (2012) ENI Prize for Renewable and Non-conventional Energy, SPIE Green Photonics Award (2012), MRS Kavli Lecturer in Nanoscience (2010), the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award (2010). He received the Joop Los Fellowship from the Dutch Society for Fundamental Research on Matter (2005), the A.T.&T. Foundation Award (1990). He won the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989) and the IBM Faculty Development Award in 1989-1990.

Professor Atwater has worked extensively as a consultant for industry and government, and has actively served the materials community, including Material Research Society Meeting Chair in 1997, AVS Electronic Materials and Processing Division Chair in 1999, Materials Research Society President in 2000, and Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. He also teaches graduate level Applied Physics classes at Caltech in optoelectronics, solid-state physics and device physics.

Professor Atwater received his B. S., M. S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively in 1981, 1983 and 1987. He held the IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University from 1987-88, and has been a member of the Caltech faculty since 1988.