Kiyoul Yang receives federal Young Investigator awards

Kiyoul Yang, assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received two Young Investigator Program (YIP) awards: one from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and the other from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). 

Yang leads Harvard’s Y-Lab, which focuses on developing next-generation photonic systems for computation, sensing, communications and metrology.

The Air Force award will support the Y-Lab’s work in integrated photonic technologies that can generate, amplify, and control extremely short pulses of light on femtosecond timescales. By engineering optical devices at the scale of the wavelength of light, the researchers seek to uncover new ways to control ultrafast light-matter interactions. These capabilities could support a wide range of applications, including optical clocks, remote sensing, climate and environmental monitoring, biomedical imaging and precision spectroscopy.

For the Office of Naval Research project, Yang and his team will develop advanced quantum control for a new generation of optical lattice clocks on a chip, aiming for greater precision and smaller and more deployable forms. To do so, the researchers will integrate technologies including high-power, low-noise lasers; high-speed optical modulation; atomic-photonic interfaces; laser mode locking; and frequency-comb systems. The effort could enable advances in precision timing, navigation, sensing and quantum technologies.

“Our team brings together in-house capabilities in photonic materials, nanofabrication, device physics and system integration, supported by infrastructure at SEAS, the Center for Nanoscale Systems, and the Harvard Quantum Initiative,” Yang said. “This integrated approach allows us to develop expertise at each layer of the system stack and address fundamental challenges that emerge at the interfaces between them.”