Principal Investigator Steven Johnson
The Nanostructures and Computation Group pursues investigations in two primary areas. The first is work on photonic crystals and electromagnetism in structured media. This is work is conducted in close collaboration with the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE) ab initio Physics Group. The second primary area of investigations are in high-performance computation, from fast Fourier transforms to large-scale eigensolvers for numerical electromagnetism.
Photonic crystals and nanophotonics employ nanoscale optical structures, on the scale of the wavelength of light, in order to produce optical phenomena far different from those in more homogeneous media. Our work has centered on three general categories of problems in nanophotonics: what new effects and devices can one achieve in such structures, how does one design devices given so many degrees of freedom, and what higher-level understanding can one develop for such complex systems. Electromagnetism also permits large-scale brute-force simulations that are essentially exact, and this has led us to a second topic of research, that of efficient numerical methods for large-scale computation. Not only have we studied advances in methods specific to electromagnetism, but we also investigate the theory and implementation of algorithms, such as FFTs, that are important for many ares of scientific computing.