Prof. John O'Brien, University of Southern California
IEEE LEOS Distinguished Lecturer
"Photonic Crystal Devices"

ABSTRACT

Two-dimensional photonic crystal devices take advantage of our ability to pattern the dielectric, through nanofabrication techniques, on a scale that is shorter than the optical wavelength at which the device operates. Patterning on this length scale allows us, in principle, to engineer the electromagnetic properties of photonic devices in microscopic detail. It is a serious challenge, however, to understand how to utilize this freedom to improve device performance, and this photonic crystal device technology is still relatively immature. Nevertheless, a great deal of progress in photonic crystal device development has been made in the past few years.

In this presentation Prof. O'Brien will discuss photonic crystal lasers with particular emphasis on devices capable of room temperature CW operation and devices with quantum dot active regions. CW lasers have -3dB modulation bandwidths over 10 GHz with approximately 30dB of side mode suppression. The photonic crystal lasers with quantum dot active regions have absorbed powers at threshold of under 15 microwatts. The presentation will also describe approaches to increasing the output power obtained from these lasers illustrated with data showing 100 microwatts of pulsed output power from a microcavity photonic crystal laser.

The presentation will also address device issues associated with passive photonic crystal components such as optical loss, waveguide dispersion, and the design of waveguide junctions. Demonstrations of Mach-Zehnder interferometers and directional couplers will be presented and again results from experiments will be compared to numerical predictions.

BIO

Prof. John O'Brien received the B.S. degree from Iowa State University in electrical engineering in 1991 and the M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1993 and 1996, respectively.

In 1997 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor. In 1999 he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and in 2000 he was awarded an NSF Career award. In 2003 he became an Associate Professor, and he was promoted to Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2006. His research interests are in nanophotonics and photonic crystal devices.

Dr. O'Brien is a senior member of IEEE and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction on Nanotechnology. He has served on the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) Subcommittee on Optical Materials, Fabrication and Characterization from 2003-2005, the Integrated Photonics Research (IPR) Subcommittee on Nanophotonics for 2004, 2005, the Technical Program Committee for the Device Research Conference for 2004, 2005, the Technical Program Committee for the Information Photonics Conference for 2005, and the Semiconductor Laser Committee for the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) annual meeting for 1998-2002, 2005-2007. He also served as the organizer and chair of the Photonic Lattices sessions at the 2000 and 2002 Laser Workshops and was the Co-Organizer of the Photonic Crystals Sessions at the Electronic Materials Conference (EMC) for 2002.