David Burghoff, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has received the Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award from the Office of Naval Research for his project “Frequency comb ptychoscopy: Imaging beyond the resolution-delay limit.”
The award, one of the oldest and most selective early-career honors, is presented to young faculty pursuing naval-relevant foundational research. This year’s 38 honorees represent 25 academic institutions across 13 states.
The goal of Burghoff’s project is to develop a new paradigm for spectroscopic imaging, one that looks at light in new ways to bypass the limitations of conventional methods.
A fundamental problem in imaging, Burghoff said, has been detecting light from an object at a distance, because of the optical delay necessary to achieve high resolution when using conventional spectroscopic methods. He and his team in the Quantum and Nonlinear Optoelectronics Group are developing a new imaging technique called frequency comb ptychoscopy. By using optical combs across a variety of bands, they hope ultimately to create a multi-spectral pytchoscopic imager. This would bypass the resolution-delay limit, allowing for spectroscopic imaging with kilohertz-level resolutions.
Burghoff joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2018. He is the principal investigator in the Quantum and Nonlinear Optoelectronics Group and is affiliated with Notre Dame Nanoscience and Technology and Notre Dame Energy. His research focuses on the development of new platforms that will allow long-wavelength light to be used in scalable sensors and systems.
— Nina Welding, College of Engineering