Koby Scheuer, Ph.D. | Communications 2025

Koby Scheuer

Associate Professor

School of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University

Speech Title:

"Nano-Antennas - Building a Bridge Between Electro-optics and Electromagnetism"

Abstract:

Although there is no basic difference between radio waves and light, the means employed to manipulate, generate and detect these waves are completely different. Light waves are generally handled by dielectric components such as lenses and fibers and semiconductor materials while radio waves are handled with metallic antennas and transmission lines. Recent advances in the field of micro and nano-fabrication facilitate the downscaling the concept of metallic antennas to submicron dimensions for operation at optical frequencies and offers unique advantages for numerous photonic applications. Such nano-antennas support unique hybrid electric-electromagnetic modes often referred to as surface plasmon polaritons, which exhibit extremely short wavelengths and strong confinement of the electromagnetic field on the nanometer scale. Employing nano-antennas at optical frequencies is highly attractive for numerous applications such as ultra-sensitive sensing, nano-scale light sources, spectroscopy, imaging, photo-detection, particle trapping, nonlinear optics, and many more In this talk, I will present our work on nano-antenna based devices for various applications, in particular, detection, nonlinear optics and particle trapping.

Bio:

Jacob "Koby" Scheuer received the B.Sc. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering and in physics, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 1993 and 2001, respectively. He was a Chief Designer with Lambda crossing-an optical component startup specializing in microring resonators for two years. Then, he joined the Center for the Physics of Information and the Department of Applied Physics, the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, as a Research Associate. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel. His research interests include nanophotonics, plasmonics, polymer optics, slow light, and secure communications. Prof. have published more than 60 papers in peer reviewed journals and listed 10 patents.

Research Interests: Nano optics and communication, encryption and very tiny light sources. Koby’s NanoPhotonics Laboratory research is focused on the optics of nanometer scale objects and devices. In particular, the research involves nano-photonic components for telecommunication and sensing, Bragg and Photonic Crystals (PhC) based waveguides and resonators, slow light, optical polymers, nonlinear optics and secure communication.