Michael Hochberg joined the WA state STAR program in 2008.  As an assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington he is directing research in nanophotonics. Dr. Hochberg received his BS (Physics, 2002), his MS (Applied Physics, 2005) and his PhD (Applied Physics, 2006) from Caltech, and he was awarded the Demetriades-Tsafka Prize in Nanotechnology for the best dissertation by a graduating Ph.D. student in the field of Nanotechnology. As a graduate student, he worked on developing integrated nonlinear optical devices using silicon photonics. He was also the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and, as an undergraduate, of a merit-based fellowship from Caltech. As an undergraduate, Hochberg co-founded two companies: Simulant, which sold the first commercial distributed FDTD code, and Luxtera, a venture-funded company working to commercialize silicon photonics. After joining the faculty at the University of Washington, Dr. Hochberg was the recipient of a 2007 Air Force Office of Sponsored Research Young Investigators Program award, as well as a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) in 2009.

The nanophotonic lab research focuses on silicon as an ideal material system for integrated optics at telecommunications wavelengths.  Silicon's extremely high refractive index and low loss make it possible for silicon waveguides to confine optical modes to sub-diffraction-limited areas. We can gain control of photons on the nanometer scale, and can force strong interactions with nonlinear waveguide claddings. Taking advantage of these capabilities, it is possible to integrate femtosecond-scale nonlinear optical functionality into silicon chip-scale devices.

 

We're interested in using the silicon photonics platform both to build interesting and important optical devices, and to explore new physical phenomena. Our projects span the space between very applied work on devices like ultra-low voltage electrooptic modulators, to interest in chip-scale nonlinear and quantum optics for novel light sources and all-optical logic circuits.