Ms. Mengjie Yu
postdoctoral
Harvard University
Mengjie Yu is a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Marko Loncar’s group in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She received her B.S. degree in Optical Engineering in 2012 from Zhejiang University and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2018 from Cornell University in Professor Alexander L. Gaeta’s group. Her research areas include optical frequency comb generation in photonic waveguides and microresonators, mid-infrared molecular spectroscopy, and coherent computing based on degenerate optical parametric oscillation.
Mengjie Yu is the winner of the 2016 Maiman Student Paper Competition and the 2016 Emil Wolf Student Paper Competition. She is also a semi-finalist of the 2017 Tingye Li Innovation Prize. She is Caltech 2019’s Young Investigator Lecturer. She has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal papers and 28 conference papers and is a referee for 15 peer-reviewed journals. She is serving as chair of the OSA Integrated Optics Technical Group.
Over the past decade, the development of nanoscale photonic technology has provided a highly promising platform for efficient nonlinear optical interactions at low optical powers and for integration of optical and electronic devices on a single chip. Such capabilities have opened opportunities for new chip-scale applications including molecular spectroscopy, optical metrology and optical computing. In this talk, I will present our recent work on applications in nonlinear photonics using silicon and lithium niobate-based platforms. In addition, I will discuss our work on microresonator-based optical frequency comb (OFC), a coherent light source composed of evenly spaced, low-noise spectral lines. By combining a powerful technique of dispersion engineering with the advancement of ultralow loss silicon photonics, we extend such chip-based OFC’s to the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectral regime, a gold mine for molecular fingerprinting and remote sensing. I will discuss chip-based mid-IR OFC generation and its applications for dual-comb spectroscopy and tunable comb spectroscopy. Furthermore, I will present our work on degenerate optical parametric oscillators using a Si3N4 microresonator, and its application for quantum random number generation and the coherent Ising machine.
