Thursday, April 19, 2012 - 1:00 PM EST
This is a free webinar presented by Photonics Media.

Sponsored by: DRS Technologies

Our speaker:
Dr. Hooman Mohseni
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
Director, Bio-inspired Sensors and Optoelectronics Lab
Director, Solid-state and Photonics Initiative
Northwestern University

Dr. Mohseni will present:
Novel Infrared Sensors for Medical, Industrial, and Homeland Security Applications

Improving sensitivity in the infrared spectrum is a challenging task due to the minute energy of each photon at less than one atto-Joule. Infrared imagers are used in many applications including explosives detection, telecommunications, biophotonics, optical tomography, and nondestructive material evaluation. In particular, short wave IR (SWIR) has attracted great attention recently. It includes the fiber optic telecommunications wavelengths around 1.5 um, and can advance rapidly emerging technologies such as quantum key distribution and quantum computing. Also, many medical applications such as optical tomography rely on SWIR, since it has great penetration depth through the skin, and therefore enables deeper non-invasive screening. Additionally, night sky radiance offers significant spectral power in SWIR, which makes SWIR uniquely attractive for homeland security applications. 

In this presentation, Dr. Mohseni will discuss how Northwestern's Bio-Inspired Sensors and Optoelectronics Lab (BISOL) has developed novel IR imagers based on carrier compression and nano-injection technology. The nano-injection imagers can provide high-fidelity internal amplification with small pixel sizes and a large number of pixels, which is currently a difficult task with mainstream technologies, primarily due to noise considerations. He will also present infrared antenna structures that create a deep sub-diffraction IR mode compression to enhance IR detector performance significantly. 
Hooman Mohseni received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University. He joined Sarnoff Corp. in 2001, where he was a technology leader for several government, domestic, and international commercial projects. He joined Northwestern University in 2004 as a faculty member. He is a recipient of National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award in 2006, and Young Faculty Award from DARPA in 2007. He was selected by NSF as a US delegate in the US-Japan Young Scientist Exchange Program on Nanotechnology in 2006, and US-Korea Nano-manufacturing Exchange program in 2007. He has served as the Advisory Board, Program Chair and Co-chair in several major conferences including IEEE Photonics, SPIE Optics and Photonics, and SPIE Security and Defense. Dr. Mohseni has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles, and holds 13 issued US and International patents on novel optoelectronic devices and nanoprocessing. He has presented more than 42 invited and keynote talks at different commercial, government, and educational institutes. He is a Fellow of SPIE, and Senior Member of IEEE.