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.

