The conference has officially ended and we would like to thank all attendees and all presenters for sharing in a great experience and strengthening the ties between our optics & photonics groups across multiple Canadian universities.
Official SPIE FOCUS sponsored conference
September 26 & 27, 2019
The second annual student conference in optics & photonics is being held at the University of Toronto from September 26 – 27, 2019. The goal of this conference is to highlight student research, at both graduate and undergraduate levels, bring young researchers in contact with academics and leaders in the field, as well as to promote and strengthen the optics & photonics community across Canadian universities.
Abstract submission: Submission Closed
We are accepting abstracts for poster as well as oral presentations until the deadline September 16, 2019.
Registration: Sign Up Closed
Registration is FREE.
Financial support for transportation and/or accomodation costs can be provided, but may be only available to SPIE/OSA chapter members.
Funds will be distributed on a first come first serve basis.
Guest Speakers:
Prof. Claude Fabre – UPMC Sorbonne Universités
Generation of Gaussian and non-Gaussian multimode entangled states of light for applications to Quantum Information Processing
The development of Wavelength Division Multiplexing has been at the origin of a revolution in communication that has even changed our everyday life. It is natural to investigate now whether this way of encoding and processing classical information can be extended to the domain of quantum information processing. We show that parametrically generated optical frequency combs, spanning over more than one million wavelength components, exhibit highly multipartite entanglement between the quantum fluctuations of its frequency modes. We show how to produce and characterize such highly multimode quantum states of light and discuss the ways to make use of them in Measurement Based Quantum Computing. We finally show how to produce, by mode-selective photon subtraction, the pure states exhibiting non-Gaussian statistics that are needed to provide a quantum advantage in Quantum Computing tasks.
Prof. Paul O’Brien – York University
One-dimensional Transparent Photonic Crystal Heat Mirrors for Solar Thermal Applications
The worldwide solar thermal capacity has grown by a factor of 7.7 from 60 GWth in 2000 to 480 GWth in 2018, and these growth rates are expected to accelerate as replacing fossil fuels becomes increasingly important. Ideally, a solar thermal collector should be strongly absorbing over the incident solar spectral region, where ~0.3 μm < λ < ~2.5 μm, while preventing thermal radiation, with ~ 2.5 μm < λ < ~ 25 μm, from escaping. In practical applications solar thermal collectors are realized using solar selective surfaces with wavelength dependent absorption properties; these surfaces are highly absorbing over the solar spectral region and exhibit low emissivity values for thermal radiation with longer wavelengths. Solar selective surfaces are well-developed and have been commonly realized using metal oxides, metals coated with thin-films comprising dielectric/metal/dielectric sandwich structures or semiconductors and metal surfaces textured on the micron scale. While a wide range of selective surfaces that absorb solar energy are available for different applications, their transparent counterparts are underdeveloped. Transparent selective surfaces, or “transparent heat mirrors”, are technologically desirable for the advancement of concentrated solar technologies that employ volumetric receivers. This talk will present the design of transparent heat mirrors in the form of photonic structures. For example, dielectric mirrors, which are effectively one-dimensional photonic crystals, have a periodic structure in the direction normal to their surface and are comprised of alternating thin-film layers with differing indices of refraction. Wave interference phenomenon caused by interactions between incident light waves and the interfaces within the periodic structure prevents light with certain wavelengths from propagating through the structure. This presentation will discuss how transparent photonic crystal heat mirrors can be optimally designed to function as covers for volumetric solar receivers operating at different temperatures.
Prof. Federico Rosei – INRS
Multifunctional materials for emerging technologies
As the age of fossil fuels is coming to an end, now more than ever there is the need for more efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies. This presentation will give an overview on recent developments in solar technologies that aim to address the energy challenge. In particular, nanostructured materials synthesized via the bottom–up approach present an opportunity for future generation low cost manufacturing of devices. We demonstrate various multifunctional materials, namely materials that exhibit more than one functionality, and structure/property relationships in such systems, including new strategies for the synthesis of multifunctional nanoscale materials to be used for applications in photovoltaics, solar hydrogen production, luminescent solar concentrators and other emerging optoelectronic technologies.
Mentorship for Young Scientists: Developing Scientific Survival Skills
In this lecture, I will try to convey a feeling for our course on “Survival Skills for Scientists” . This is a graduate course designed and developed in my department, in which we give basic advice and offer mentorship to our graduate students and post-docs. The central theme of this presentation is that succeeding in Science requires skills (often referred to as ‘soft professional skills’) beyond those needed for Science.
The lecture aims at giving basic guidance and mentoring to young scientists (typically science and engineering undergraduate and first year graduate students).
The main topics are:
– The job market for graduates in science and engineering (industry, national labs and academia; advantages and disadvantages)
– Funding in modern science
– Publish or perish; publishing quality papers, having an impact
– Presenting your work to your peers
– The fundamental laws of ‘scientific survival’ (know yourself, plan ahead, and play chess)
– Ethics in modern science
– Alternative careers
Dr. Zachary Vernon – Xanadu
Continuous Variable Quantum Photonics
Integrated quantum photonics has for the past decade been nearly synonymous with single photons and photon pairs. Yet many promising near term use cases of photonic quantum simulation and computation are best implemented using continuous variable (CV) encodings, which typically require squeezed light rather than single photons. In this presentation, I provide an overview of our work towards realizing scalable CV quantum simulation and computation, including the most recent progress in developing nanophotonic sources of squeezed light.
Schedule:
| Thursday, September 26, 2019 | Friday, September 27, 2019 | |||||
| 9:30 am to 10:00 am | Registration | GB 202 | 9:30 am to 10:00 am | Registration | GB 202 | |
| 10:00 am to 11:00 am | Invited Talk Prof. Federico Rosei Multifunctional materials for emerging technologies | GB 202 | 10:00 am to 11:00 am | Invited Talk Prof. Claude Fabre Generation of Gaussian and non-Gaussian multimode entangled states of light for applications to Quantum Information Processing | GB 202 | |
| 11:00 am to 11:10 am | Coffee Break | GB 202 | 11:00 am to 11:10 am | Coffee Break | GB 202 | |
| 11:10 am to 12:10 pm | Invited Talk Prof. Paul O’Brien One-dimensional Transparent Photonic Crystal Heat Mirrors for Solar Thermal Applications | GB 202 | 11:10 am to 12:10 pm | Invited Talk Dr. Zachary Vernon Continuous Variable Quantum Photonics | GB 202 | |
| 12:10 pm to 1:00 pm | Lunch | GB 202 | 12:10 pm to 1:00 pm | Lunch | GB 202 | |
| 1:00 pm to 1:20 pm | Ilan Tzitrin Redoing and undoing local actions from afar: entanglement recast as an operational symmetry | MS3154 | 1:00 pm to 1:20 pm | Zujun Xu Red-shifted Spectrum in Multi-Frequency Raman Generation | GB 202 | |
| 1:20 pm to 1:40 pm | Joshua Baxter Deep Learning for the Prediction and Inverse Design of Plasmonic Colours | MS3154 | 1:20 pm to 1:40 pm | Mitra Rahimian Mapping Complex Polarization States of Light on a Solid | GB 202 | |
| 1:40 pm to 2:00 pm | Moein Shayegannia Low Concentration Molecular Detection Using Multiwavelength SERS on Width-Graded Plasmonic Gratings | MS3154 | 1:40 pm to 2:00 pm | Abdullah Rahnama Fiber Bragg Grating Opto-fluidic Sensor | GB 202 | |
| 2:00 pm to 2:20 pm | Mahdi Safari Optically and RF Transparent Meta-Glass | MS3154 | 2:00 pm to4:00 pm | Coffee Break & Poster Session | GB 202 | |
| 2:20 pm to 2:30 pm | Coffee Break | MS3154 | 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm | Award ceremony and Closing remarks | GB 202 | |
| 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm | Lab Tours Wheeler Microfluidics Laboratory Herman Laser Processing Lab Kherani Advanced Photovoltaics-Photonics and Devices Group Miller Atomically Resolved Dynamics Lab Burton Tower Telescopes | Depart from MS3154 | ||||
| 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm | Public Lecture Prof. Federico Rosei Mentorship for Young Scientists: Developing Scientific Survival Skills | GB303 |
GB = Galbraith Building
MS = Medical Sciences Building
Campus map is available at http://map.utoronto.ca/
A PDF version of the Schedule and the Book of Abstracts can be found below:
