Nanophotonics for Solar and Thermal Applications

Professor Shanhui Fan

Stanford Universit, California, USA

2:15 pm Monday, 7 May 2012, EN615 Lecture Theatre (EN Building), Hawthorn.

The use of nanophotonic structures, where the minimum feature sizes of the structures are in the single or deep sub-wavelength scales, opens new possibilities for manipulating light. Such nanophotonic structures are  of crucial importance for light management in solar cells, and for controlling thermal transport that results from thermal radiation. In this talk, I will review some of our recent works in aiming to develop nanophotonic structures for solar and thermal applications. We show that the use of nanophotonic structures can result in the solar radiation trapping capability that is far beyond the conventional limit. We will also show that nanophotonic structures can be used for active control of near-field thermal transport.

Bio: Shanhui Fan is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Stanford University. He received his Ph. D in 1997 in theoretical condensed matter physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was a research scientist at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT prior to his appointment at Stanford. His research interests are in computational and theoretical studies of solid state and photonic structures and devices, especially photonic crystals, plasmonics, and meta-materials. He has published 240 refereed journal articles that were cited over 15,000 times, has given over 180 invited talks, and was granted 43 US patents. Prof. Fan received a National Science Foundation Career Award (2002), a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2003), the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiative in Research (2007), and the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America (2007). Dr. Fan is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America,  the SPIE, and the IEEE.

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