Damian's PhD Dissertation Defense
Photonics lab member Damian Pablo San Roman Alerigi has successfully defended his PhD dissertation.
More information about the dissertation:
Exploring Heterogeneous and Time-Varying Materials for Photonic Applications, Towards Solutions for the Manipulation and Confinement of Light.
PhD Candidate: Damian Pablo San Roman Alerigi
Advisor: Professor Boon Ooi
When: On Thursday, Nov 6 2014 @ 10:00 am
Where: Room # 5209, Level 5, Building 3
Over the past several decades our understanding and meticulous characterization of the transient and spatial properties of materials evolved rapidly. The results present an exciting field for discovery, and craft materials to control and reshape light that we are just beginning to fathom. State-of-the-art nano-deposition processes, for example, can be utilized to build stratified waveguides made of thin dielectric layers, which put together result in a material with effective abnormal dispersion. Moreover, materials once deemed well known are revealing astonishing properties, v.gr. chalcogenide glasses undergo an atomic reconfiguration when illuminated with electrons or photons, this ensues in a temporal modification of its permittivity and permeability which could be used to build new Photonic Integrated Circuits..
This work revolves around the characterization and model of heterogeneous and time-varying materials and their applications, revisits Maxwell's equations in the context of nonlinear space- and time-varying media, and based on it introduces a numerical scheme that can be used to model waves in this kind of media. Finally some interesting applications for light confinement and beam transformations are shown.
Biography: Damian joined KAUST in 2009 as a founding class member within the Master’s program in Photonics, and continued to the Ph.D. in 2011. His work aims to understand and model the interaction of light with heterogeneous and time-varying media. His research also spans to the realm of applications, where space- and time-varying materials can ultimately lead novel photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
Damian’s work has been published in different journals, including Optics Express and Applied Physics Letters; it has been presented in several conferences around the world, and featured in technology magazines and news magazines. He received his Diploma in Physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2009, a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2010.
After graduation, Damian will be joining Aramco (EXPEC ARC) as a Petroleum Scientist II.
