Enhancing and Shaping Radiation from High-Energy Particles with Nanophotonics

Speaker:

Dr. Charles Roques-Carmes (MIT, Cambridge, MA)

Abstract:

Nanophotonics has become over the past decades a paramount technology, enabling, among other things, the design of novel light sources, detectors, and devices controlling the polarization, spectral, and angular distribution of light. A landmark of nanophotonics is the design of nanostructured materials (metasurfaces, photonic crystals, nanoresonators, etc.) to tailor the interaction of light with matter, either by shaping light propagation at the nanoscale, or by controlling emission from atoms and molecules. In this talk, we will show how one can enhance and tailor radiation from high-energy particles, such as free electrons and x-rays with engineered nanophotonics structures. We present a framework to model, tailor, enhance, and even optimize radiation from free electrons and other high-energy particles interacting with nanophotonic structures. We then describe the building of a featured experimental setup to record spectrally-resolved light emission from free electrons interacting with nanophotonic structures. We utilize our methods to demonstrate nanophotonic enhancement of coherent and incoherent cathodoluminescence, in addition to scintillation from x-rays.

Biography:

Charles Roques-Carmes is a postdoctoral associate at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, working with Prof. Marin Soljačić. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2022. Charles has performed research and collaborated with groups across MIT, Harvard, ITMO (Russia), the Technion (Israel) and Tel-Aviv University. His research interests include nanophotonics, light-matter interactions, free electron physics, x-ray imaging, and photonic computing. Charles has published his research in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Communications, and Physical Review X. He has given invited talks at several international conferences, such as CLEO, SPIE, and METANANO. He is the recipient of several awards, including appearing on the Forbes 30 under 30 Science 2023 list, the Stanford Science Fellowship 2023, the Mathworks Engineering Fellowship, the Robert B Guenassia Award, and is a Carnot Foundation Fellow. Prior to that, Charles has received Masters of Science from MIT (2018), Ecole Polytechnique in France (2016), and a Bachelor of Science from Ecole Polytechnique (2015).

MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Forbes Rd. Cafeteria, 3 Forbes Rd, Lexington, Massachusetts, United States, 02421, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/348424