News & Events

02-15-23

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been awarded a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships. Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships "honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders," according to the foundation's announcement. A total of 156 Caltech researchers have received the awards to date. [Caltech story]

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01-18-23

Saransh Sharma, advised by Azita Emami, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Executive Officer for Electrical Engineering; Director, Center for Sensing to Intelligence, and Ryoto Sekine, advised by Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, have been selected to receive the 2023 Jakob van Zyl Predoctoral Research Award. The Jakob van Zyl Predoctoral Research Award is given in the memory of Electrical Engineering alum Jakob van Zyl, who led significant research efforts at JPL and also taught classes at Caltech for many years.

Tags: honors Azita Emami Alireza Marandi Ryoto Sekine Saransh Sharma

09-15-22

Electronic computing and communications have come a very long way since the days of radio telegraphy and vacuum tubes, with consumer devices now containing levels of processing power and memory that would be unimaginable just a few decades ago. "The quality of the quantum states we have achieved surpasses the requirements for quantum information processing, which used to be the territory of bulky experimental setups," says Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights Alireza Marandi

07-30-22

One of the major limitations of optics-based systems at present is that, at a certain point, they still need to have electronics-based transistors to efficiently process the data. Now, a team led by Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has created an all-optical switch. Such a switch could eventually enable data processing using photons. Device nanofabrication was performed at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at Caltech. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights KNI Alireza Marandi Rajveer Nehra Saman Jahani Luis Ledezma Arkadev Roy Qiushi Guo Ryoto Sekine Robert Gray

06-23-22

Louise Schul, advised by John Doyle, Jean-Lou Chameau Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering, is one of four recipients of the 2022 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Louise is interested in multiple fields in electrical engineering, especially signal processing and optics. This summer, she will be working on a SURF project with Professor Alireza Marandi to improve a tunable laser source. After graduation, she plans to attend graduate school and eventually work in industry. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to engineering students with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: EE honors Henry Ford II Scholar Award John Doyle Alireza Marandi Louise Schul

04-28-22

A team of engineers led by Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, recently opened a new frontier in topological physics, which is the field that seeks to understand the topological properties that arise in coupled systems based on how they are organized and coupled. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights Alireza Marandi James Williams Midya Parto

04-11-22

Scientists know that molecules in our exhaled breath can reveal a vast amount of medical information; for example, sensors to precisely measure minute changes in the concentrations of different vapors in breath may one day replace the standard blood test.” However, no technology is yet available to access this data from exhaled breath in a timely, affordable way. A new process for generating self-reinforcing wave pulses, also known as solitons, may pave the way toward bringing optical molecular sensing out of the lab and into medical devices with a compact footprint. 

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Tags: EE Alireza Marandi Rajveer Nehra Saman Jahani Luis Ledezma Arkadev Roy

12-02-21

The Caltech Center for Sensing to Intelligence (S2I) has announced that, in collaboration with Rockley Photonics, a photonics-based health monitoring and communications solutions company, it will allocate $1.5 million in research grants over the next three years to jumpstart efforts to combine sensors with artificial intelligence. "We would like to have sensors in every device these days, generating a huge amount of data," says Azita Emami, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and the director of S2I. "But it's difficult to extract the most important information from the mountains of data they create." [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS EE Changhuei Yang MedE CMS Azita Emami CNS Animashree Anandkumar Alireza Marandi Katie Bouman

02-25-21

Devices known as optical parametric oscillators are among the widely used nonlinear resonators in optics; they are "nonlinear" in that there is light flowing into the system and light leaking out, but not at the same wavelengths. Though these oscillators are useful in a variety of applications, including in quantum optics experiments, the physics that underpins how their output wavelength, or spectrum, behaves is not well understood. "When you add strong nonlinearity to resonators, you enter what we call a 'rich physics regime,'" says Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics. "'Rich' in physics terms usually means complicated and hard to use, but we need nonlinearities to create useful functionalities such as switching for computing." To be able to make full use of nonlinear optical resonators, researchers want to be able to understand and model the physics that underpin how they work. Marandi and his colleagues recently uncovered a potential way to engineer those rich physics, while discovering phase transitions in the light that is generated by the resonators. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights KNI Alireza Marandi

11-04-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been named the 2019 KNI-Wheatley Scholar in Nanoscience for his proposal to develop and study resonator-based quadratically nonlinear nanophotonic devices. [Past recipients]

Tags: APhMS EE honors Alireza Marandi