(Note: This Open Lecture Series event was sponsored by TU/e Alumni Relations and High Tech Campus Eindhoven.)

Can a talk by two photonics pioneers fill an auditorium at High Tech Campus?

In Eindhoven it can, where nearly 300 people – including alumni of Eindhoven University of Technology and industry leaders – turned out to hear Professor Jaime Gómez-Rivas and Luc Augustin, CTO of SMART Photonics, explore the basics of photonics, as well as delve into new developments in an emerging technology essential to everything from communications to healthcare.

Gómez-Rivas opened his lecture on metaoptics with Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s rumination from 1959. “Could humans someday use light to focus and transmit data the way they generated and beamed radio waves?” Feynman asked. A technology that would require microscopic antennae in an array, with a parenthetical observation that “such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.”

Au contraire.

Harnessing light – what we now call photonics and metaoptics – is a trillion-dollar business. Gómez-Rivas explained how light, rather than electrons, is focused – per Feynman’s prediction – through nanometer-sized radio frequency antennas and nanometer-scale “lenses” for wireless optical communication.

In his 30-minute talk, Gómez-Rivas noted that “printing” nanostructures at a billionth of a meter on substrate – Surface Conformal Imprint Lithography – harkens back to Gutenberg’s printing press.

Six hundred years later, we can print photonic circuitry capable of dipole emission on various media, enabling the transmission of light, radio signals and other energy spectra.

Metaoptics use “nanopillars” to manipulate light with a precision that conventional refractive lenses can’t begin to approach. Metasurface responses can be tuned for all properties of light, including phase, wavelength, amplitude and polarization. With new research in coherence entropy – how light is affected by the environment and irregularities in the hardware – photonics will become even more prevalent.

Photonics can be used for metaoptics-based Google glass-type wearable displays, directional micro-LED lighting that has no optical elements, 3D sensors for gamers, LIDAR for autonomous vehicles and integrated photonic chips for computing and communication.

Gómez-Rivas concluded his portion of the event with a slide with Feynman’s observation edited to read “such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.”

SMART Photonics’ Luc Augustin followed with “Integrated Photonics: The Next Generation Chips.” With the emergence of artificial intelligence, the demand for data is doubling every two years, twice as fast as only a few years ago. “Photonics is really crucially important,” Augustin said, with faster, smaller and more energy-efficient photonic integrated circuits, or PICs, rather than conventional microcircuits.

Next-generation chips will have more functionality on a single chip, Augustin said.

Making light do what you want it to do requires mastering the properties of light. Conventional computer chips and integrated circuits using electrons have limited functionality. Photonic chips can transmit, receive and amplify signals. That requires an increasing number of multiple nano-sized components – lasers, amplifiers, modulators and demodulators – on the same chip.

One of the unique photonic capabilities is that different colored light can transmit or process data independently on the same photonic chip, Augustin said. Photonic chips use Bragg Grating that block or deflect certain wavelengths of specific pitches to create sort of a photonic filter. Small changes in this pitch, e.g., by temperature or mechanical stress, change the reflected wavelength.

Once you have a tiny integrated chip – only 4 x 4 millimeters – the applications are almost infinite, including sensing, boosting fiber optic cable capacity and making data center switching faster and more energy efficient, Augustin said. Photon First makes a photonic sensor for monitoring and detecting stress in turbines.

“This is only possible if you can make it in a single chip. You can’t do that with a box the size of a shoebox weighing 10 kilos with moving mirrors and lenses. That’s impossible.”

Now, all the components can fit on a tiny solid-state chip integrating electronics and photonics weighing a few grams “and that’s a nice demonstration of the power of integrated photonics.”

Photonics can be adapted for almost any use case, so planes, cars and medical instruments are just the beginning, Augustin said.