Mohanty Receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Aseema Mohanty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her work improving photonic integrated circuits. The NSF CAREER Program supports exceptional early-career faculty who have the potential to drive innovative advances in research while serving as academic role models and leaders.

Just like an electronic circuit uses electricity to create power, a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) is powered by photons of light. PICs are best-known for their applications in fiber optic cables and other areas of telecommunications. Compared to electronic circuits, they can transmit information more quickly, generate less heat, and have lower energy consumption. They’re often powered by infrared light, but Mohanty’s project aims to advance PICs that use light from the visible wavelength.

Using visible light comes with extra challenges, such as the need to control light through wavefront shaping. Current methods require either table-top optics or chips with large waveguide systems that take up a lot of space. PICs on the visible light spectrum can suffer from loss of quality, and other complications including the need for electrical control power. These drawbacks make visible light PICs difficult to use in real-world scenarios.  

Mohanty’s NSF-funded project, “Nanoscale wavefront shaping with multimode photonic integrated circuits,” addresses some of the challenges facing real-world PIC integration. Mohanty will test improvements that could scale PICs down to chip size where they could be mass manufactured for biomedical devices, quantum computers, portable displays, and more.

Her project hinges on experimentally validating the theoretical framework for multimode wavefront shaping. This method would allow for more channels to be included in each waveguide and reduce the overall size of wavefront shaping mechanisms, making it more feasible to incorporate PICs in devices. Using these findings, Mohanty plans to develop and test compact devices and photon emitters that use multimode PICs.

Smaller PIC-powered devices with single-cell resolution could open new research possibilities in areas like neurotechnology. Mohanty will test her system on neural stimulation with a goal of improving understanding of neurodegenerative diseases and mental illness. Ultimately, she hopes to make photonic circuits cheaper, more scalable, and portable, bringing them closer to widespread dissemination across industries.

While the primary goal is to improve PIC technology, Mohanty also wants to inspire the next generation of engineers through interactive activities for K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students. She will develop hands-on activities focused on semiconductors and chip-scale technologies and collaborate with the Tufts STEM Ambassadors to share these lessons with local high school students. She will also use PICs to help get middle school students excited about science during Nano Day, an immersive early-exposure science event.

Mohanty joined Tufts in 2020 and leads the Mohanty Nanophotonics Lab. Her research uses nanophotonics and engineered light-matter interactions to create miniaturized high performance optical circuits to control, shape, and sense light. Her interest in chip-scale optical devices broadly spans the fields of neuroscience, implantable and wearable biomedical sensors, 3D optical beam shaping, quantum information, and emerging computing and communication systems.

The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation. Research reported in this article was supported by the National Science Foundation under the following award number: 2442096