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Canada Research Chair in the Theory, Manufacturing and Applications of Photonic Crystals

Dr. Skorobogatiy has established a multidisciplinary effort at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, which involves researchers from other major academic and industrial photonic research centres. Ultimately, his work will have a profound scientific and technological impact on the development of photonics for optical communications and advanced materials, as well as on health science and engineering research, all of which are of primary importance to the Canadian economy.

Research Involves

Speeding up the maturation of photonic crystal technology and its penetration into the industrial sector by perfecting the manufacturing process and development of imperfection tolerant designs.

Making Photonic Crystals to Shine

Photonic crystals, or Photonic Band Gap (PBG) materials, have demonstrated unprecedented potential for manipulating the properties of light. Built as a periodic texture made up of at least two materials with sufficiently different optical properties, photonic crystals become highly reflective in a certain frequency range (also called band gap), enabling one to control light with startling facility and to produce effects that are impossible with conventional optics. These photonic crystals have opened the way to a variety of possible applications including highly compact and reconfigurable telecommunication components, as well as hollow core fibres that exhibit ultra low transmission losses at almost any wavelength leading to unprecedented opportunities for high power laser guidance in medicine and material processing.

The fabrication of photonic crystals is challenging work. The necessity of using a combination materials which are optically and physically quite different from one another, requires complicated fabrication processes that are hard to perfect and model. Moreover, manufacturing tolerances become very stringent when the materials used exhibit a high refractive index contrast, which is typical in PBGs.

Despite the complexity of the problems, Canada Research Chair Maksim Skorobogatiy believes that using a systematic engineering approach that includes the design of imperfection tolerant PBG devices, optimization of the manufacturing process through modelling, and introducing tunability in the post-processing stage, will finally make photonic crystals both technologically and commercially viable.

Skorobogatiy, Maksim, Associate professor
Engineering Physics department
(514) 340-4711 poste 3327
maksim.skorobogatiy@polymtl.ca