Integrated Photonics: Creating new materials, one atom at a time
You’ll find photonics in your phone, your TV and even in the cameras that recorded this film.
Integrated photonics is the idea of taking optical devices like lasers, LEDs or solar cells and intimately integrating them with electronics to create more complex devices.
To do this, we need to be able to mix materials and make a different type of semiconductor material. We call these materials, compound semiconductors. We grow the material. We make high purity single crystals by depositing layers of material, single atoms at a time. An atom is about one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.