There's Plenty of Light-on-a-Chip

Prof. Alina Karabchevsky (Eng, Ph.D., MSc. BSc.) is a Full Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Visiting Researcher in the Physics Department of Lancaster University UK. She is the Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering Affinity Group. She is the Director of the Light-on-a-Chip Center at BGU. Prof. Alina Karabchesvky holds a Ph.D. in Electrooptics Engineering (BGU). Her post-doc experience is from the leading research center of optoelectronics research located at the University of Southampton (UK), where Prof. Karabchevsky worked on the development of a waveguide-based platform for wideband integrated photonics. From 2015, as a faculty at Ben-Gurion University, she has established state-of-the-art integrated photonics experimental and computational facilities – Light-on-a-Chip Center. She wrote more than 250 articles, among them 70 in the leading journals of optical research, and holds 13 patents. Her main research interests lay in the areas of integrated photonics and microfibers, all-dielectric photonics, plasmonics, microfluidics, optomechanics.

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The projects at Light-on-a-Chip are funded by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Innovation Authority (Kamin), and BGU internally.

 

 

Professional memberships: OSA, IEEE, SPIE

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Journal referee: Light: Science & Applications, Optics Letters, Optics Express, Plasmonics, AIP Advances, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics

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My current research focuses on On-chip nanophotonics [Karabchevsky et al Invited Review for Nanophotonics deGruyter 2020]. On-chip nanophotonics is the emerging and rapidly growing branch of On-chip photonics (or Integrated photonics) in which the waveguides are either of nanoscale dimensions or hybrid waveguides (such as in Karabchevsky et al Opt Express 2015) which are classical waveguides with nanoscale overlayers of slab film, nanoantennas [Karabchevsky et al Advanced Optical Materials 2020], or metamaterial overlayers [Karabchevsky Light Science and Appplications 2020]. 
Why nanoPhotonics?: “Let there be Light (Photonics!)”, Genesis 1:3. From the very first studies of optics 1000 years ago, through the invention of the laser about five decades ago to optics communications which powers the internet today, photonics has revolutionized medicine, opened up international communication via Internet, and continues to be central to linking cultural, economic and political aspects of the global society. The ability to manipulate and tailor electromagnetic signals on a guided-wave devices (Karabchevsky et al, ACS Photonics 2018), emerging from recent technological advances, facilitates addressing fundamental (Samkhi,..,Karabchevsky et al Phys Rev Lett 2019,) and technological challenges (Karabchevsky et al, Light Science and Applications 2016), and paves the way for a variety of new applications such as cloaking on a chip (Galutin, Felek and Karabchevsky Top 100 SciRep 2017), monitoring of the cancer treatment efficiency (Katiyi, .., Karabchevsky Biosensors and Biolectronics 2020, ENG-MED grant 2017-2018). Integrated photonics is expected to play an increasingly important role in optical communications, imaging, and sensing with the promise of a significant reduction in the cost and weight of these systems. Future advancement of this technology is critically dependent on an ability to develop compact and reliable optoelectronic components and facilitate their integration on a common substrate. Novel devices of engineered photonics (Karabchevsky, Light Science and Applications 2016; Light Science and Applications 2020) will find use in various applications, such as homeland security, cyber, biotech, optics communication, space and quantum technology to name a few. As tools for biology and medicine, multifunctional optical traps will facilitate new approaches to cell sorting, macromolecular purification, intracellular surgery, embryonic testing and highly parallel drug screening. According to the Photonics market, it is expected to grow from USD 556.4 billion in 2018 to USD 780.4 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 7.0% from 2018 to 2023. The need for energy-efficient products and the increasing adoption of photonics products in various applications are the key drivers for the growth of the photonics market globally (Project funded by Israel Innovation Authority 2020-2022). Israel is among the world-leading nations in photonics and nanotechnology research. Driven by the dream of untapped planar device functionality, my research merges the fundamentals of chemistry, physics and engineering. All this is aimed at studying the interaction of light with matter on a chip in a diffraction limit regime at the scale where optical, electronic, structural, thermal, and mechanical properties are deeply interdependent. My research aims to control light fast within only a few oscillation cycles of the light wave, in a miniature device containing only a few layers of atoms using signals carried by only a few photons for emerging applications ranging from quantum technology to biosensors of dangerous viruses with ultra-high sensitivity.