Harvesting Light, Tunable Sound Switches and Beyond - Nicholas Xuanlai Fang

iCANX Talks: talks.ican-x.com/index
Harvesting Light, Tunable Sound Switches and Beyond
Professor Nicholas Xuanlai Fang
Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT
Group Website: web.mit.edu/nanophotonics/
ABSTRACT:
Will future of smart lighting and window coatings enable energy-efficient cooling in smart buildings? Can printed color converters lead to next generation micro displays with high brightness, sharp image resolution, and ultra‐low power consumption? Recently, exciting new physics of nanoscale optical materials has inspired a series of key explorations to manipulate, store and control the flow of information and energy at unprecedented dimensions. In this talk I will report our recent efforts on controlling light harvesting and conversion process using scalable micro/nanofabrication. These emerging optical materials show promise to a range of important applications, from optical networks and chip-scale photonic sensors to lasers, LEDs, and solar technology. For example, I will introduce our recent collaborative efforts on versatile 3D shape transformations of nanoscale structures by deliberate engineering of the topography-guided stress of gold nanostructures. By using the topography-guided stress equilibrium, rich 3D shape transformation such as buckling, rotation, and twisting of nanostructures is precisely achieved, which can be predicted by our mechanical modeling. Benefiting from the nanoscale 3D twisting features, giant optical chirality is achieved in an intuitively designed 3D pinwheel-like structure, in strong contrast to the achiral 2D precursor without nano-kirigami. The demonstrated nano-kirigami, as well as the exotic 3D nanostructures, could be adopted in broad nanofabrication platforms and could open up new possibilities for the exploration of functional micro-/nanophotonic and mechanical devices. I will also present our development of advanced design and micro/nanofabrication techniques, to enable exploration architectured meta structures for acoustic waves. These structures show promise on focusing and rerouting ultrasound through broadband metamaterials.
BIOGRAPHY:
Nicholas X. Fang received his BS and MS in physics from Nanjing University, and his PhD in mechanical engineering from University of California Los Angeles. He is currently professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Prior to MIT, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2004 to 2010. Professor Fang’s areas of research look at nanophotonics and nanofabrication. His recognitions include the ASME Chao and Trigger Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (2013); the ICO prize from the International Commission of Optics (2011); an invited participant of the Frontiers of Engineering Conference by National Academies in 2010; the NSF CAREER Award (2009) and MIT Technology Review Magazine’s 35 Young Innovators Award (2008).