Antennas and Electromagnetics Group seminar – 5th August 2025

When: Tuesday, August 5, 2025, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Where:

On the 5th of August we will have a talk from Dr Luke Peters. The title of Dr Luke Peters’s talk is: “Novel Terahertz Light Sources: From Dielectric Metasurfaces to Soliton Microcombs”.

Terahertz (THz) photonics is advancing rapidly, offering disruptive capabilities in ultrafast wireless communication, spectroscopy, and sensing. This talk explores two emerging, complementary platforms for coherent THz generation—both offering unprecedented control over the temporal and spectral structure of THz pulses. First, we present all-dielectric metasurfaces based on AlGaAs/GaAs nanoresonators that harness morphology-mediated resonances and intrinsic nonlinearities for ultrafast THz pulse generation. These metasurfaces achieve a 40× efficiency gain over unpatterned substrate, while enabling programmable spatiotemporal shaping of the THz waveform via resonator geometry and excitation wavelength. 

Second, we demonstrate a laser-cavity-soliton microcomb system that enables broadband, lowjitter THz comb generation across the sub-THz spectrum. The system supports single-cycle, carrier-offset-free operation and spectral tailoring through multi-soliton states—enabling direct, stable THz emission with minimal power. Together, these platforms showcase powerful routes to engineer coherent THz sources with tailored pulse characteristics, unlocking new frontiers in 
time-domain control, spectroscopy, imaging, and integrated photonic systems. 

Speaker bio: Dr Luke Peters is an incoming Lecturer in Photonics at Loughborough University and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Emergent Photonics Research Centre. He received his PhD from the University of Sussex, where he was awarded the Roger Blin-Stoyle Prize for his doctoral research in terahertz surface phenomena. Luke has held research positions at Sussex and KAUST, with a focus on nonlinear metasurfaces, computational imaging, and coherent THz source development. He was recently named to the Photonics100 list of innovative researchers shaping the future of photonics.

The speaker has also kindly agreed on sharing his academic journey with us for approximately 10 minutes. We strongly encourage our PhD students and PDRAs to attend, as we believe it would be highly beneficial and inspiring.

Hybrid mode: In-person: Graduate Centre: GC201 + Online (Click here to join the meeting)