Did you know that chip-based photonics hardware can take a matrix-vector product nearly three orders of magnitude faster than the best GPU?  A few picoseconds is all that’s required; we just need to build it. My group is involved in optics and photonics hardware, especially materials and structures that can enhance light-matter interaction, in order to target applications in highly fast and highly parallel computing, optical communications, quantum information processing, and holography. We are interested in fabrication with nonlinear optical materials and devices, and our group is actively engaged in industrially-relevant research in vertical cavity lasers, solar cells, and nonlinear optical materials useful for long distance optical fiber communications and on-chip quantum optics with lithium niobate-on-insulator and barium titanate-on insulator. Materials such as lithium niobate are traditionally rather difficult to work with in terms of practical fabrication challenges, but overcoming some of these challenges would permit photonics-on-chip applications, quantum-optics-on-chip applications, and allow miniaturization of traditionally large external optical modulators. This will be necessary not only for future optical datacom applications, but also for quantum optics applications where programmatic control of single photons will ultimately be required.  Our group recently was awarded a $7 million Competitive Research Project from Singapore’s National Research Foundation related to Ising Computers and we are actively working on optical Ising machines and optical hardware for neuromorphic computing.

My group also hosts the undergraduate student NUS Solar Powered Helicopter Team, which in 2018, was the first to achieve controlled 100% solar flight in a rotorcraft.