Faculty Profiles

Mookherjea and the Micro/Nano-Photonics group (http://mnp.ucsd.edu) study chip-scale linear, non-linear and quantum photonic devices. Coupled microring devices have been used for highly efficient four-wave mixing and room-temperature heralded single photon generation from a silicon chip, in collaboration with IBM and NIST. Research has studied theoretically and experimentally the effects of disorder in high index contrast waveguide structures, and demonstrated light localization in periodically-patterned silicon waveguides. Devices fabricated by the group have been used by collaborators to generate infrared light by nonlinear wavelength conversion from compact fiber-optical seed sources, and in microfluidic mixers / sensors. In parallel to functional device development, the group’s research also focuses on the fundamentals of modeling, measuring and improving the behavior of inter-connected high-index contrast silicon photonic devices, e.g., loss and disorder estimation from statistical analysis of light propagation, spatially- and spectrally-multiplexed infrared diagnostic method in silicon multi-ring resonator circuits, and nano-oxidation of silicon rings and interferometers. 

Capsule Bio:

Shayan Mookherjea joined the UCSD faculty in 2003 as Assistant Professor, and was appointed Associate Professor with tenure in 2008. Mookherjea received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering with honors from Caltech in 1999, and his S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, with a minor in Physics, from the California Institute for Technology in 2003, where he was awarded the Charles Wilts Prize for his thesis research. Mookherjea is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), and has received the NSF CAREER and URSI Young Scientist awards.