In a paper published online July 4 in Nature Nanotechnology, a team led by University of Washington scientists reported the design of an energy-efficient, silicon-based non-volatile switch that manipulates light through the use of a phase-change material and graphene heater. The exceptional performance of their switch could help advance both information technology and quantum computing.
An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Washington, led by Arka Majumdar, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics, was awarded $3.6 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to use meta-optics to develop a dramatically smaller endoscope that can image previously inaccessible areas of the heart and brain.
Researchers at the UW and Princeton University have developed an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The system relies on metasurfaces fabricated at Washington Nanofabrication Facility to produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in Nature Communications.
Tunoptix, a Seattle-based optics startup co-founded by University of Washington electrical and computer engineering professors Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar, received a $1,500,000 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from NASA to advance their meta-optics imaging systems.
A multi-institutional research team led by NanoES faculty members Mo Li, Arka Majumdar and Karl Böhringer is developing a powerful, miniaturized optical control engine, called PEAQUE, which will greatly increase capacity and speed of quantum computers.
A UW team led by Karl Böhringer and Arka Majumdar has developed a tunable lens made of metasurfaces and actuated by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).