Engineers and business leaders have been working on autonomous cars for years, but there's one big obstacle to making them cheap enough to become commonplace: They've needed a way to cut the cost of lidar, the technology that enables robotic navigation systems to spot and avoid pedestrians and other hazards along the roadway by bouncing light waves off these potential obstacles. After all, today's lidars use complex mechanical parts to send the flashlight-sized infrared lasers spinning around like the old-fashioned, bubblegum lights atop police cars -- at a cost of $8,000 to $30,000. But now a team led by electrical engineer Jelena Vuckovic is working on shrinking the mechanical and electronic components in a rooftop lidar down to a single silicon chip that she thinks could be mass produced for as little as a few hundred dollars. Jelena Vuckovic, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership in the School of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering and, by courtesy, of applied physics. The project grows out of years of research by Vuckovic's lab to find a practical way to take advantage of a simple fact: Much like sunlight shines through glass, silicon is transparent to the infrared laser light used by lidar (short for light detection and ranging).

Combining state-of-the-art optimization and machine learning techniques with high-speed electromagnetic solvers offers a new approach to "inverse" design and implement classical and quantum photonic circuits with superior properties, including robustness to errors in fabrication and environment, compact footprints, novel functionalities, and high efficiencies. In this plenary talk, Jelena Vuckovic of Stanford University illustrates this with a number of demonstrated devices in silicon, diamond, and silicon carbide, including wavelength and polarization splitters and converters, power splitters, couplers, nonlinear optical isolators, on-chip laser driven particle accelerators, and efficient quantum emitter-photon interfaces. Jelena Vuckovic is a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. Vuckovic has won numerous awards including the Humboldt Prize and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is a Fellow of APS, OSA, and IEEE.