Planar photonic crystals for ultra-broadband ultrasound detection and generation

超声在许多应用中发挥着重要作用，包括医疗保健(例如，临床诊断、医疗和外科手术)和工业监测(例如，无损检测和材料表征)。在所有这些应用中，超声波的检测和产生都迫切需要换能器。然而，目前的超声换能器在可探测性、空间分辨率和带宽方面都存在局限性，这严重阻碍了现有超声技术的性能。该奖项将支持用于超声检测和产生的新型人工设计的低维周期性光子结构(即平面光子晶体)的基础研究。这项工作有望为新型超声换能器的开发开辟新的途径，有可能克服传统超声技术遇到的根本限制。包括物理学、材料科学和医学在内的不同学科预计将从拟议研究的不同方面受益。这一奖项有望帮助培养具备纳米光子学和先进材料新兴技术知识的新一代学生。此外，该奖项还将有助于扩大未被充分代表的群体在研究中的参与，并通过与研究成果相结合的跨学科课程中的创新项目来丰富学生的学习经验。通过结合分析、数值和实验研究，这项工作的总体目标是实现对平面光子晶体(PPC)中的光子-声学响应和慢光效应的基本了解，并利用这种理解来开发具有显著增强的性能和超声检测和产生能力的新型PPC换能器。这项研究有望丰富不断增长的纳米光子学领域的知识，并导致利用PPC进行超声检测和产生的新方法。PPC的独特性质，包括高品质因数(Q因数)共振、多模光机械响应和抗热干扰，将被研究。这些特性使PPC在超声检测方面比现有的超声波传感器具有明显的优势。该奖项将导致开发一种新的基于PPC的超声波传感器，具有超宽带检测、高灵敏度和高空间分辨率的能力。此外，还将研究PPC中用于增强光-物质相互作用的慢光效应，这将使基于PPC的新型超声发生器的开发具有显著增强的能量转移效率。此外，该奖项预计将导致一种基于光纤的新型纳米压印技术的开发，以实现可扩展、廉价和高精度的光纤上PPC器件和芯片上PPC阵列的批量制造。

Ultrasound plays an important role in many applications, including health care (e.g., clinical diagnostics, medical therapy, and surgery) and industrial monitoring (e.g., non-destructive detection and material characterization). In all these applications, transducers are critically needed for detection and generation of ultrasound. However, the current ultrasonic transducers are limited in detectability, spatial resolution, and bandwidth, which seriously hinder the performance of existing ultrasonic techniques. This award will support fundamental research on novel artificially designed low-dimensional periodic photonic structures (i.e., planar photonic crystals) for ultrasound detection and generation. This work is expected to open up new avenues for the development of novel ultrasound transducers, which can potentially overcome the fundamental limitations encountered with conventional ultrasonic technologies. Various disciplines including physics, material science, and medicine are expected to benefit from different facets of the proposed research. This award is expected to help create a new generation of students equipped with knowledge of emerging technologies in nanophotonics and advanced materials. In addition, this award will also help broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in research and enrich the learning experience of students with innovative projects in an interdisciplinary curriculum integrated with the research findings.Through combined analytical, numerical, and experimental studies, the overall goal of this work is to achieve a fundamental understanding of the photonic-acoustic responses and slow light effect in planar photonic crystals (PPCs), and to use this understanding to develop novel PPC based transducers with significantly enhanced performance and capabilities for ultrasound detection and generation. This research is expected to enrich the knowledge in the growing field of nanophotonics and lead to new methodologies for ultrasound detection and generation with PPCs. The unique properties of PPCs, including high quality factor (Q-factor) resonance, multimode photo-mechanical response, and immunity to thermal interference, will be investigated. These properties give PPCs a clear advantage over existing ultrasonic sensors for ultrasound detection. The award will lead to the development of a new class of PPC based ultrasonic sensors with capabilities of ultra-broadband detection, high sensitivity, and high spatial-resolution. Furthermore, the slow light effect in PPCs for enhancing light-matter interactions will be investigated; this will enable the development of novel PPC based ultrasound generators with significantly enhanced energy transfer efficiency. In addition, this award is expected to lead to the development of a novel optical fiber based nano-imprinting technique, for enabling scalable, inexpensive, and high-precision batch fabrication of on-fiber PPC devices and on-chip PPC arrays.