By David Murphy
KAUST Ph.D. student Omar Alkhazragi has been awarded a 2023 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by the international society for optics and photonics, SPIE.
Founded in 1955, SPIE is one of the largest optics and photonics societies worldwide.
“I am honored and humbled to receive this international scholarship. I am also very grateful to my supervisor, Professor Boon S. Ooi, for encouraging me to apply and for endorsing my application,” noted Alkhazragi.
An electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student at the KAUST Photonics Laboratory, his research primarily focuses on designing and fabricating multi-functional optoelectronic devices for high-speed optical communication and quantum applications.
He is currently working on fabricating and testing a novel class of semiconductor lasers—vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs)—that can enable a variety of applications. Through careful design of the cavity of VCSELs, Alkhazragi and his colleagues achieve outstanding illumination and imaging performance without sacrificing the high speed of the lasers; this is crucial for communication, sensing and quantum applications.
“We hope to demonstrate the excellent performance of chaotic-cavity lasers in new applications to inspire other researchers to explore this exciting field and push it to its full potential,” he concluded.
