Piezoelectricity is a property of a special class of materials that couples electric fields and strain. In this talk, I will discuss my groups’ work in using this property in specially designed microsystems to radically enhance the  performance of and enable completely novel functionalities in two very different classes of microsystems. First, I will discuss how piezoelectrically actuated and optomechanically tuned photonic integrated circuits have enabled a flood of novel and highly scalable systems for quantum computing. Then I will discuss how we have coupled together piezoelectric acoustic waves and semiconductors to create systems that may completely revolutionize wireless communications systems.

Bio

Matt Eichenfield is the SPIE Endowed Chair in University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences and a Distinguished Faculty Joint Appointee at Sandia National Laboratories. He received his BS in physics from UNLV in 2004, MS in physics from Caltech in 2007, and his PhD from Caltech in 2009, with his thesis, “Cavity Optomechanics in Photonic and Phononic Crystals”, winning the Demitriades Prize for best Caltech thesis in nanoscience. He then became the first Kavli Nanoscience Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech before joining Sandia as a Harry S. Truman Fellow in 2011. At Sandia he founded and led the 20-member MEMS-Enabled Quantum Systems (MEQS) group before joining OSC in 2022. As Sandia’s first Distinguished Faculty Joint Appointee, he continues to lead the MEQS group at Sandia while building the Quantum NanophoXonics group at OSC, which currently has 13 graduate students, 3 postdocs, and 2 technologists.