Instructors/Speakers
Dr. Maria-Pilar BERNAL
Research Director of FEMTO-ST (Franche-Comté Electronics Mechanics Thermal Science and Optics-Sciences and Technologies) Institute
CNRS (National Scientific Research Center)
France
Abstract
The optics community has used since decades lithium niobate material for various application like optical modulation, lasers, acousto-optical devices etc. Due to its multi-physical nature (it possesses high electro-optic, acousto-optical, photorefractive, pyroelectric, and nonlinear coefficients), it is rather straightforward to imagine a lithium niobate chip in which thousands of optical functions could be incorporated. In this talk, work that Dr. Bernal’s group at CNRS has been doing since the last 10 years in order to achieve this goal will be presented. Different active optical functions based on lithium niobate photonic crystals and plasmonic nanostructures combined with lithium niobate will be presented. The possibility of currently working with lithium niobate thin films on SiO2 has allowed us to radically improve the optical performances of these devices. Results of novel photonic nanostructures based on single crystal lithium niobate will be shown.
Biography
Dr. Maria-Pilar Bernal received her Bachelor degree in physics at University of Zaragoza, Spain in 1993. In the year of 1998, she obtained her doctoral degree in physics through a joint study program between University of Zaragoza and IBM Research-Almaden in California USA. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in EPFL Switzerland on near-field and nano optics for about three years which began from September 1998. Since 2003, she worked as a researcher in FEMTO-ST institute CNRS(法國國家科研中心). Currently she is the Directrice of FEMTO-ST institute in Besancon. Her research works include electro-optic exaltation and nonlinear effect enhancement in lithium niobate photonics. She also works on plasmonics such as utilizing annular aperture array structure for extraordinary optical transmission and other sensing applications. She had already been the responsible person for various projects such as ANR(法國科研署), DGA(法國國防部), ERC(歐盟研究中心) and DARPA etc. She had already been invited to give talks for ten more conferences, published one book chapter and patented an USA patent on optical information storage system. She has been author or coauthors of over 100 papers.