Dr. Danny Zhu of United States Military Academy at West Point

Recent advances in manufacturing techniques have been made to match the demand for high performance optical devices. To this end, tremendous research activity has been focused on optical metasurfaces as they offer a unique potential to achieve disruptive designs when paired with innovative fabrication techniques and inverse design tools. However, most metasurface designs have revolved around canonical geometries. While these elements are relatively easy to fabricate, they represent only a small portion of the design space, and rarely offer peak performance in transmission, phase range or field of view. In this work, a Lazy Ant Colony Optimization (LACO) technique is applied in conjunction with a full-wave solver using the Periodic Finite Element Boundary Integral (PFEBI) method to reveal high performing three-dimensional nanoantenna designs with potential applications for a variety of optical devices.

Biography:

Danny Z. Zhu was born in Ivory Coast, Africa in 1984. He received the Bachelors and Masters of Science degrees in electrical engineering in 2007 from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

In 2007, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps, serving multiple tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Republic of Korea as an Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Platoon Leader, Detachment Executive Officer and Company Commander respectively. In 2018, he completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Currently, Dr. Zhu serves as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the United State Military Academy atWest Point. His research interests include frequency selective surfaces, metamaterials, high performance computing and applications of multi-objective and evolutionary optimization algorithms.