Electrical and Computer Engineering Seminar
Ertugrul Cubukcu
Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
Thursday, December 12, 2024, 11:00 am-12:00 pm
B02 CSL Auditorium or Online via Zoom
Title: Resonant Light-Matter Interactions for Monolayer Optoelectronic Devices and Sensors
Abstract: Light-matter interactions enable a number of technologies we use on a daily basis such as the internet and solid-state lighting. Therefore engineering the way light interacts with matter will lead to better and more efficient components and new technologies. To this end, in my group we study resonantly enhanced light-matter interaction on the nanometer length scales. And we utilize this in combination with emerging monolayer semiconductors and semimetals for novel devices and sensors. In this talk, I will give a few representative examples of these multifunctional devices. In the first part, I will talk about an electromechanically controlled doubly-resonant second harmonic generating device based on a monolayer semiconductor that offers ~3000x enhancement in nonlinear light generation and optical waveguiding at the ultimate Angstrom thickness limit probed by Fano resonances. In the second part, I will present a new type of a graphene enabled multimodal biosensor that can measure protein-protein interactions in the full opto-electro-mechanical domain achieving ~100x improvement in the linear sensing dynamic range. In this part, I will also introduce a new optoelectronic biological voltage sensing modality based on electric field dependent exciton-trion conversion in monolayer semiconductors and discuss our experimental results with cardiomyocyte cultures. In the last part, I will present our results on achieving the “mechanical analog” of a laser in an optical metamaterial. This is accomplished by simultaneous mechanical and photonic metamaterial resonances coupled through a photothermal feedback mechanism.
Ertugrul Cubukcu received his Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Harvard University in 2008. Following his postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. In 2015, he relocated to University of California, San Diego, where he is currently an associate professor in the nanoengineering department. He is the recipient of IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and TASSA Young Scholar Award.
He is the author or coauthor of over 50 journal papers. His group explores light-matter interactions for the nanoscale opto-electro-mechanical devices and sensors that utilize unique features of monolayer materials. His work has been featured in Optics and Photonics News, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, Nature Photonics, and Laser Focus World.