NanoPhoto Research Lab
See the future through nanophotonics

Research Mission

Nanophotonic devices have emerged as pivotal components in various technological domains, including solar energy harvesting, integrated nanophotonic light sources, quantum communications, nonlinear optics, light modulators, smart cameras, hydrogen production, and virtual reality. The advent of metasurfaces, capable of manipulating light at the nanoscale, presents an exciting opportunity to revolutionize these fields. Our research group aims to explore the potential of tunable metasurfaces in these applications, emphasizing size reduction compared to diffractive optics, enhanced efficiency, and the ability to tailor performance as the key objectives for expediating the delivery of this technology as commercial devices.

Research Areas

Nanophotonics for solar cells

Metasurfaces improve the efficiency of solar energy conversion technologies, such as photovoltaics and photoelectrochemical cells. They optimize light absorption, spectral control, and energy conversion efficiency, thereby increasing the overall performance of solar cells.

Tunable structural colors

Nanocavities can confine the light into few nanometer thickness film to allow strong structural color in visible. Utilizing materials with adjustable optical properties, such as phase change materials, i.e. antimony trisulfide (Sb2S3), can result in tunable structural colors on demand. A wide dynamic range of colors of up to ~220 nm, and a gamut coverage of more than 80% of standard RGB realized via the crystallization and re-amorphization of Sb2S3.

Deep ultraviolet coherent light sources

Dielectric nonlinear metasurface can induce ultra-strong light-matter interaction through supporting high Q-factor resonances such bound states in the continuum (BICs) to create DUV light sources.

Tunable nonlinear optics

Hybrid metasurfaces consisting of silicon metasurface and phase change material (GST) can modulate the nonlinear harmonic generation for compact light source modulators.

Tunable Nano-lasers

Ultralow threshold nanolasers achieved using metasurfaces made from gain materials at any desired wavelength for future compact coherent light sources. Tunable metasurfaces will enable tunable nanolasers on demand.

Ultrafast tunable materials

Ultrafast tunable materials with switching speed down to ~10 pico-seconds (100 GHz) would enable ultrafast nanophotonic devices. Obtaining multi-level of switching would boost number of functionalities as well.

NanoPhotoNet

AI-driven hybrid deep learning model that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for modelling multi-layer metasurfaces (MLMs) devices.

Nanophotonic Quantum Communications

Novel 2D materials such as NbOX2 have strong second order nonlinearity. Integrating these 2D materials with tunable nanophotonic cavity will enable tunable photon-pair generation for future quantum communication devices.

Entrepreneurship

We are engaging with entrepreneurship incubators at NTU and A*STAR to collaborate with industry for the market implementation of innovative nanophotonic solutions.

NanoPhoto Research LabSee the future through nanophotonics

NanoPhoto Research Lab
See the future through nanophotonics