Abstract

Artificially engineered, subwavelength-scale structures, such as metamaterials and metasurfaces, allow us to control the behavior of electromagnetic, acoustic, or thermal fields with unprecedented flexibility and performance that are unattainable with naturally available materials. With the fascinating capabilities of manipulating light with judiciously designed nano-elements, many new physics and unparalleled applications have been demonstrated, such as steering the light to an arbitrary direction, generating optical vortex beams, and enhancing the optical spin-orbit interaction. In this talk, I will highlight some recent developments on the metaphotonics which lead to several novel photonic devices such as ultrathin planar micro-lenses, high-resolution holograms, photon spin detectors, and invisibility skin cloaks. Furthermore, I would like to introduce our recent exploration on the new approaches to achieve nonreciprocal photon transport with metaphotonics.

Short Bio

Dr. Ni joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University as the Charles H. Fetter Assistant Professor in 2015. He is also a faculty member of the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Xiang Zhang’s group at University of California, Berkeley. He received his BS degree in Engineering Physics in 2005 and his MS degree in Automation in 2007 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He completed his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 2012 under supervision of Dr. Vladimir Shalaev. He is an inaugural Moore Inventor Fellow, and he received NASA Early Career Faculty Award in 2017. His research interests are in nanophotonics and optoelectronics, which encompass photonic/plasmonic devices, electromagnetic metamaterials/metasurfaces, photonic sensors, and quantum optics.