VINSE Colloquium Series “Flat Optics for Wavefront Manipulation and Mixed Reality Eyewear” Student Selected Speaker Dr. Mark Brongersma; Stanford 04/13/2022
April 13, 2022
8th Annual VINSE Student Selected Seminar Series
Mark Brongersma
Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials
Stanford University
“Flat Optics for Wavefront Manipulation and Mixed Reality Eyewear“
4:10 PM, 134 Featheringill Hall
Since the development of diffractive optical elements in the 1970s, major research efforts have focused on replacing bulky optical components by thinner, planar counterparts. The more recent advent of metasurfaces, i.e. nanostructured optical coatings, has further accelerated the development of flat optics through the realization that resonant optical antenna elements can be utilized to facilitate local control over the light scattering amplitude and phase.
In this presentation, I will start by showing how passive metasurfaces can start to impact Augmented and Virtual Reality applications. I will discuss the creation of high-efficiency, metasurfaces for optical combiners for near-eye displays, OLED displays, and eye tracking systems. I will also briefly highlight recent efforts in our group to realize electrically-tunable metasurfaces employing nanomechanics, tunable transparent oxides, microfluidics, phase change materials, and atomically-thin semiconductors. Such elements are capable of active wavefront manipulation for optical beam steering and dynamic holography. The proposed optical elements can be fabricated by scalable fabrication technologies, opening the door to many commercial applications.
Bio. Mark Brongersma is the Stephen Harris Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He leads a research team of ten students and five postdocs. Their research is directed towards the development and physical analysis of new materials and structures that find use in nanoscale electronic and photonic devices. He is on the list of Global Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics). He received a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Physics) for his work on plasmonics, and is a Fellow of the OSA, the SPIE, and the APS. Dr. Brongersma received his PhD from the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1998. From 1998-2001 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.
Members of the 2022 Graduate Student Selection Committee:
- Jenna Dombroski, Biomedical Engineering (committee chair)
- Janna Eaves, Mechanical Engineering
- Ella Hoogenboezem, Biomedical Engineering
- Nicholas Hortance, Interdisciplinary Materials Science
- Nathan Spear, Interdisciplinary Materials Science
Previous speakers include:
- John Rogers, Northwestern University, 2020
- Naomi Halas, Rice University, 2019
- George Whitesides, Harvard University, 2018
- Michael Strano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018
- Paul Weiss, University of California, Los Angeles, 2016
- Ted Sargent, University of Toronto, 2015
- Mostafa El-Sayed, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014