2.718/2.719: Photonic Materials

Spring | Graduate + Undergraduate | 12 Units | Prereq: 18.02 Calculus, 8.02 Physics II or 6.013 Electromagnetics and Applications, and 18.03 Differential Equations

This class is gateway for a doctoral qualifying exam (in Optics) for the graduate students.

Recommended: 2.71/2.710 Optics, 2.096J Introduction to Numerical Simulation, 2.097J Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations. 

Light-matter interactions underscore the emerging fields of quantum science and engineering, energy harvesting, and radiative heat transfer. Understanding and engineering these interactions requires the knowledge of advanced computational techniques in both time and frequency domains. This course will equip the students with practical how-to information and computational tools to select, engineer, and optimize broadband optical response of materials and photonic devices for different applications as well as to process and visualize the results.

Concepts in optics, material science, and thermodynamics (light absorption, reflection, emission, guiding, visual color formation, radiative cooling and heating, photonic sensing, photonic metamaterials and meta-surfaces engineering) and numerical methods (data analysis and visualization, algorithms and software engineering, eigenproblem and boundary-value problem solutions, time- v. frequency-domain photonic solvers, direct v. inverse photonic design techniques) are introduced and applied to model and design photonic materials for a variety of applications. The target audience for the class includes students who focus on advancing photonic and materials engineering in their research as well as those who aim to understand practical aspects and use software tools to model optical behavior of materials for solar, thermal, wearable, radiation-shielding, biosensing, imaging, or environmental degradation applications. The course development has been supported with a curriculum development grant from MathWorks.

The students leave the course with a set of practical coding and visualization tools that they can build upon and/or apply directly to solving their research problems in the areas ranging from quantum materials to material spectroscopy to radiative heat transfer to photonic biosensing. The ultimate goal of the pilot is to educate “computing photonic materials bilinguals” – students fluent in computing, photonics, and materials science.

More information: https://sboriskina.mit.edu/teaching#Photonic_metamaterials