Integrated nanophotonics using functional materials

光子学是一个快速发展的领域，在过去的几年里见证了一些令人难以置信的进步。这是由于纳米制造技术的进步，更好的建模工具以及对新兴机器学习和人工智能应用程序处理速度和带宽的追求所引起的兴趣激增。光子学使用光作为信息载体，因此可以利用光纤电缆目前在电信中进行的并行信息传输。然而，为了实现这一目标，这些组件必须集成到硅芯片上，然后处理要求这些芯片能够动态地操纵和路由这种光。到目前为止，尽管取得了巨大的进步，但这种组合光子芯片离实现还有一段距离。该项目将使用功能材料解决这一问题的一个主要方面-虽然硅是一种很好的电子功能材料（因为它可以进行差异掺杂，从而产生开关等功能），但这并不能很好地转化为光学。因此，光学需要一组完全不同的功能材料。我们的团队是探索这一领域的领导者之一，特别是硫系相变材料，安毅的项目将研究新型功能材料，以实现芯片上的路由和开关操作。这是一个新的研究领域，特别是功能路由不仅可以实现计算应用，还可以实现光子学中需要处理光信号的许多其他应用。因此，它不仅符合EPSRC当前的几个战略和研究领域（人工智能和机器人，工程，ICT和制造）。该项目将主要属于EPSRC工程研究领域。

Photonics is a fast moving field that as witnessed some incredible progress over the last few years. This has been due to advances in nanofabriocation technology, better modeling tools as well as a hige surge in interest driven by the quest for greater speed and bandwidth of processing for emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. Photonics use light as the information carrier and thus cam make use of the parallel information transfer that fibre optic cables currently do in telecommunications. However, in order to achieve that, such components must be integrated onto silicon chips and then processing requires that these chips be able to manipulate and route this light dynamically. As of now, in spite of huge advances, such a combined photonic chip is still some distance away from being realized. This project will address one major aspect of this using functional materials - whilst silicon is a good functional material for electronics (because it can be differentially doped and thus create functions such as switches), this does not translate well into optics. Thus optics requires an entirely different group of functional materials. Our group is one of the leaders in exploring this space, particularly with chalcogenide based phase change materials, an Yi's project will look into novel functional materials to achieve routing and switching operations on a chip.This is a novel area of research, especially as functional routing will enable not only computing applications, but also a host of other applications within photonics that require processing of light signals. Thus, it not only aligns to several of EPSRC's current strategies and research areas well (AI and Robotics, Engineering, ICT and Manufacturing). This project would fall mostly within the EPSRC Engineering research area.