Biography: Andrea Ferrari is Professor of nanotechnology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He founded and directs the Cambridge Graphene Centre. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the Institute of Physics, the Optical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, The European Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and he received numerous awards, such as the Royal Society Brian Mercer Award for Innovation, the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, the Marie Curie Excellence Award, the Philip Leverhulme Prize, The EU-40 Materials Prize.

Graphene and layered materials for photonics and optoelectronics

Andrea C. Ferrari

(Cambridge Graphene Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 OFA, UK)

Graphene and layered materials have great potential in photonics and optoelectronics, where the combination of their optical and electronic properties can be fully exploited, and the absence of a bandgap in graphene can be beneficial. The linear dispersion of the Dirac electrons in graphene enables ultra-wide-band tunability as well as gate controllable third-harmonic enhancement over an ultra-broad bandwidth, paving the way for electrically tuneable broadband frequency converters for optical communications and signal processing. Saturable absorption is observed as a consequence of Pauli blocking and can be exploited for mode-locking of a variety of ultrafast and broadband lasers. Graphene integrated photonics is a platform for wafer scale manufacturing of modulators, detectors and switches for next generation datacom and telecom. These functions can be achieved with graphene layers placed on top of optical waveguides, acting as passive light-guides, thus simplifying the current technology. Heterostructures based on layers of atomic crystals have properties different from those of their individual constituents and of their three dimensional counterparts. The combinations of such crystals in stacks can be used to design the functionalities of such heterostructures, that can be exploited in novel light emitting devices, such as single photon emitters, and tuneable light emitting diodes.