Professor Arka Majumdar
Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Washington
Abstract
Modern image sensors consist of systems of cascaded and bulky spherical optics for imaging with minimal aberrations. While these systems provide high quality images, their improved functionality comes at the cost of increased size and weight. One route to reduce a system’s complexity is via computational imaging, in which much of the aberration correction and functionality of the optics is shifted to post-processing in software. Alternatively, a designer could miniaturize the optics by replacing them with diffractive optical elements, which mimic the functionality of refractive systems in a more compact form factor. Meta-optics are an extreme example of such diffractive elements, in which quasiperiodic arrays of resonant subwavelength optical antennas impart spatially varying changes on a wavefront. While separately both computational imaging and meta-optics are promising avenues toward simplifying optical systems, a synergistic combination of these fields can further enhance system performance and facilitate advanced capabilities.
In this talk, I will present a method to combine these two techniques to enable ultrathin optics for performing full-color and varifocal imaging across the whole visible spectrum as well as high precision depth sensing. I will also discuss the use of computational techniques for designing meta-optics with exotic behaviors lacking any intuition-informed design, as well as for performing computation on incident light, with applications in optical information processing, sensing, and computing. By combining meta-optics and software backend, we can realize compact imaging systems with unprecedented functionalities, including broadband aberration-free imaging, depth sensing and optical computing. We believe such hybrid digital-optical system will create a new research field on “Software Defined Optics”, akin to Software Defined Radio, where the software is used to simplify the hardware.
Biography
Prof. Arka Majumdar is an Associate Professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Washington. He received B. Tech. from IIT-Kharagpur (2007), where he was honored with the President’s Gold Medal. He completed his MS (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley (2012-13) as a postdoc before joining Intel Labs (2013-14). His research interests include developing a hybrid nanophotonic platform using emerging material systems for optical information science, imaging, and microscopy. Majumdar is the recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the AFOSR (2015), ONR (2020), NSF (2019) and DARPA (2021), Intel early career faculty award (2015), Alfred P. Sloan fellowship (2018), and UW college of engineering outstanding junior faculty award (2020). He is co-founder of Tunoptix, a startup commercializing meta-optics.