News & Events

05-04-20

A new camera developed by Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, is capable of taking as many as 70 trillion frames per second. The camera technology, which Wang calls compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP), combines a laser that emits extremely short pulses of laser light that last only one quadrillionth of a second (one femtosecond) with optics and a specialized type of camera. The technology could open up new avenues of research in fields that include fundamental physics, next-generation semiconductor miniaturization, and the life sciences. "We envision applications in a rich variety of extremely fast phenomena, such as ultrashort light propagation, wave propagation, nuclear fusion, photon transport in clouds and biological tissues, and fluorescent decay of biomolecules, among other things," Wang says. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE KNI Lihong Wang

03-31-20

Andrei Faraon, Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and team have shown that atoms in optical cavities—tiny boxes for light—could be foundational to the creation of a quantum internet. They identified a rare-earth ytterbium ion in the center of a beam. The ytterbium ions are able to store information in their spin for 30 milliseconds. In this time, light could transmit information to travel across the continental United States. "It's a rare-earth ion that absorbs and emits photons in exactly the way we'd need to create a quantum network," says Faraon. "This could form the backbone technology for the quantum internet." [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights KNI Andrei Faraon Andrei Ruskuc Jake Rochman John Bartholomew Yan Qi Huan

03-25-20

Professor Azita Emami's group in collaboration with Professor Wei Gao’s group has won the best student paper award at the 2020 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference. The title of the paper is "A Fully-Integrated Biofuel-Cell-Based Energy Harvester with 86% Peak Efficiency and 0.25V Minimum Input Voltage Using Source-Adaptive MPPT." The IEEE CICC is a premier conference devoted to integrated circuit development. The conference program is a blend of oral presentations, exhibits, panels and forums. The conference sessions present original first published technical work and innovative circuit techniques that tackle practical problems. [Read the paper] [Past recipients]

Tags: EE honors MedE Kuan-Chang Chen Azita Emami Wei Gao Arian Hashemi You Yu Abhinav Agarwal William Kuo Minwo Wang Gudrun Hoskuldsdottir

02-25-20

Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has developed variants of photoacoustic imaging that can show organs moving in real time, develop three-dimensional (3-D) images of internal body parts, and even differentiate cancerous cells from healthy cells. Photoacoustic imaging, a technique for examining living materials through the use of laser light and ultrasonic sound waves, has many potential applications in medicine because of its ability to show everything from organs to blood vessels to tumors. Wang has now further advanced photoacoustic imaging technology with what he calls Photoacoustic Topography Through an Ergodic Relay (PATER), which aims to simplify the equipment required for imaging of this type. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE KNI Lihong Wang

01-21-20

Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has developed the world's fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It's so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion. "What we've done is to adapt standard phase-contrast microscopy so that it provides very fast imaging, which allows us to image ultrafast phenomena in transparent materials," says Wang. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE KNI Lihong Wang

11-04-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been named the 2019 KNI-Wheatley Scholar in Nanoscience for his proposal to develop and study resonator-based quadratically nonlinear nanophotonic devices. [Past recipients]

Tags: APhMS EE honors Alireza Marandi

10-14-19

Professor Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has won a 2019 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award. The objectives of this program are: to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Professor Marandi received the award for his proposal entitled, "Simulton Frequency Combs: Quadratic Solitons for Generation of Few-Cycle Pulses in the Mid- and Long-Wave Infrared."  [AFOSR Press Release]

Tags: APhMS EE honors Alireza Marandi

10-10-19

Caltech has launched the Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering to train the next generation of science-savvy software engineers and set new standards in scientific software. "This is a recognition that computing, software, and machine learning are going to play a very big role in science. Because Caltech is small and collaborative, we have the opportunity to really make a push in that direction," says Kaushik Bhattacharya, the Howell N. Tyson, Sr., Professor of Mechanics and Materials Science and vice provost. [Caltech release]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights MCE CMS Tapio Schneider Donnie Pinkston Kaushik Bhattacharya

09-16-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, is a recipient of a 2019 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for his research project entitled "Non-Von Neumann Computing Using Nonlinear Photonics." This prize honors top young researchers working in the fields of information and telecommunications. [Past Recipients]

Tags: APhMS EE honors Alireza Marandi

08-26-19

Graduate student Jin Sima, working with Professor Shuki Bruck, has won the 2019 IEEE Jack Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award. This award winning paper "Optimal k-Deletion Correcting Codes," provides the first optimal solution to the 50 year open problem of constructing codes that can correct multiple deletion errors. [Read the paper]

Tags: EE honors Shuki Bruck Jin Sima