Nanophotonics-Enhanced Systems for the Soldier
Nanophotonics maximizes the potential to control and tailor the behavior of light, enabling many important civilian and military applications. In this project, the Johnson and Soljačić research groups will focus on exploring physics and designs by which nanophotonics can provide new capabilities for sensors and light sources of interest for Soldier applications, exploiting new theoretical ideas, computational algorithms, and emerging experimental platforms. This will include metalens-enhanced computer-vision systems as well as enhanced Raman sensors, with the help of novel computational “inverse design” techniques. Novel sources will include free-electron sources, large-modal-volume photonic-crystal lasers, cascaded THz sources, Fock states of light, and Floquet gain media.
Example of end-to-end inverse design approach which optimizes a nanophotonic structure along side the signal processing algorithm.
Example of potential high-resolution x-ray imaging from nanophotonic scintillator designs.