Michal Lipson - Research

Research

Dr. Lipson is best known for her work on silicon photonics. She developed (along with other researchers around the world at IBM, Intel, Ghent University) silicon photonic components such as waveguide couplers, ring resonators, modulators, detectors, WDM wavelength sources and sensors on silicon platform. She published the first paper on a class of versatile waveguides known as Slot-waveguides in 2004, which has since been cited over a hundred times. She was also the first to demonstrate optical parametric gain in silicon, which was considered an important step towards building optical amplifiers in silicon.

Lipson's McArthur fellowship citation mentions her work in ring modulators (circular waveguides) as the key contribution of Lipson via the continued refinement of both opto-electronic and purely optical circuits for smaller size, increased efficiency, and accelerated switching speed The resulting silicon-based photonic integrated circuits have the potential to improve signal transmission and processing dramatically.

Dr. Lipson has received numerous honors, including being the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and an NSF Young Investigator Career award. She is also an elected fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA). Her current research interests include optical metamaterials, low-power and compact optical modulators, and slot waveguides. Her work has appeared in Nature, Nature Photonics, and other journals.