On February 27th, 2023 at 11.30 am Rachel Morgan, PhD student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, will give a seminar on "Germanium on Silicon Integrated Photonics and Deformable Mirrors for Space Mission" in PoliFAB Seminar Room.

This talk will discuss the development of a Germanium-on-Silicon platform for mid-wave infrared integrated photonics. In particular, it will go over the fabrication development and waveguide characterization with different fabrication flows. Then, it will discuss upcoming designs for active component integration. This talk will also cover the payload development and operation of the Deformable Mirror Demonstration Mission CubeSat payload, which demonstrated wavefront control with a MEMS deformable mirror during 1.5 years of on-orbit operations. The talk will summarize the payload design, alignment, calibration, integration, environmental testing, operations, and data processing.

Rachel Morgan is a PhD student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Her research interests are advanced optical technologies for satellite instruments, in particular integrated photonics and adaptive optics.