Title: Optics a la mode - a new way of making, using and understanding optics Abstract: Modern micro and nano fabrication now let us make complex and highly functional optics. Examples include sophisticated metasurfaces and highly programmable and even self-configuring silicon photonic interferometer meshes, with many potential applications in areas such as imaging, sensing and communications. Such systems are, however, quite unlike the previous optics of lenses, mirrors and prisms, so we also need new ways to think about them, physically and mathematically. Fortunately, there is a very powerful new "modal" approach for these and other complex wave systems, one that is both mathematically straightforward and physically directly meaningful. It leads to new fundamental physical laws and limits, gives new understanding of old optics, such as why your mobile phone camera needs thickness and where diffraction limits really come from, correctly counts channels for communication and sensing, and opens new design approaches and classes of optical systems and applications. Programmable circuits based on such ideas can also exploit convenient new architectures, topologies and algorithms that allow simple control and even direct optical solution of difficult problems in real time. The talk will introduce these ideas, showing how these lead to new systems, applications, understanding, and limits in optics and waves generally. About the Speaker: David Miller is the W. M. Keck Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University. He received his Ph. D in Physics from Heriot-Watt University in 1979, and before Stanford was with Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 1996, as a department head from 1987. His interests include nanophotonics, quantum-well optoelectronics, and optics in information sensing, interconnects, and processing. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, a quantum mechanics text, and over 75 patents, and has a Google h-index > 110. He was President of IEEE LEOS (now Photonics Society) in 1995. He has also taught open online quantum mechanics classes to over 80,000 students. He has received several awards, is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, OSA, IEEE, the Electromagnetics Academy, the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, holds two Honorary Doctorates, and is a Member of the US National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering.Virtual Location URL: https://ucf.zoom.us/j/94659261515?from=addon

Title: Optics a la mode - a new way of making, using and understanding optics Abstract: Modern micro and nano fabrication now let us make complex and highly functional optics. Examples include sophisticated metasurfaces and highly programmable and even self-configuring silicon photonic interferometer meshes, with many potential applications in areas such as imaging, sensing and communications. Such systems are, however, quite unlike the previous optics of lenses, mirrors and prisms, so we also need new ways to think about them, physically and mathematically. Fortunately, there is a very powerful new "modal" approach for these and other complex wave systems, one that is both mathematically straightforward and physically directly meaningful. It leads to new fundamental physical laws and limits, gives new understanding of old optics, such as why your mobile phone camera needs thickness and where diffraction limits really come from, correctly counts channels for communication and sensing, and opens new design approaches and classes of optical systems and applications. Programmable circuits based on such ideas can also exploit convenient new architectures, topologies and algorithms that allow simple control and even direct optical solution of difficult problems in real time. The talk will introduce these ideas, showing how these lead to new systems, applications, understanding, and limits in optics and waves generally. About the Speaker: David Miller is the W. M. Keck Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University. He received his Ph. D in Physics from Heriot-Watt University in 1979, and before Stanford was with Bell Laboratories from 1981 to 1996, as a department head from 1987. His interests include nanophotonics, quantum-well optoelectronics, and optics in information sensing, interconnects, and processing. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, a quantum mechanics text, and over 75 patents, and has a Google h-index > 110. He was President of IEEE LEOS (now Photonics Society) in 1995. He has also taught open online quantum mechanics classes to over 80,000 students. He has received several awards, is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, OSA, IEEE, the Electromagnetics Academy, the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, holds two Honorary Doctorates, and is a Member of the US National Academies of Sciences and of Engineering.Virtual Location URL: https://ucf.zoom.us/j/94659261515?from=addon