While June Sang Lee joined Oxford University’s Advanced Nanoscale Engineering (ANE) group to work on phase-change photonics for novel optoelectronic/nanophotonic devices, he believes energy applications will figure large in photonics research in the near term.
‘Although solar cells have been a favourite topic for past decades, the current focus of photonics is still more into displays, information processing, computing, and optical communication that utilise bandwidths of optical domains. However, I believe there is plenty of room for photonics to take a role in energy applications. For instance, “radiative cooling”.’
Integration and scale are two areas that Lee believes need to be overcome. ‘While the size of the photonic chip itself is reduced to extreme spatial scale (e.g. sub-wavelength-sized), the size of optical setup, such as lasers, microscope, or spectrometer, cannot be easily reduced or integrated with other photonic components.’
You can find Lee at linkedin.com/in/june-sang-jason-lee-804064b3 or the ANE group at nanoeng.materials.ox.ac.uk. He plans to attend MRS Fall meeting 2022 (Boston) in December.
Organisation: University of Oxford
Role: PhD (DPhil) Student
Based in: Oxford
Education: BEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering, UCL; MPhil Micro and Nanotechnology, University of Cambridge; DPhil Materials, University of Oxford
