Harnessing complexity in light-matter interactions for imaging and security

Interactions between optical fields and physical devices are extremely fast yet incredibly complex and thus naturally exhibit an immense capacity for information that is well beyond what is possible using conventional hardware (e.g. electronics). Here I will discuss our work on harnessing this unrivaled information capacity to enable photonic systems for imaging and information security that outperform traditional limits. Specifically, I will discuss our work on harnessing volumetric optical scattering to create miniscule compressive optical imagers that operate with a sub-Nyquist number of measurements. Additionally, I will discuss our work on harnessing ultrafast nonlinear interactions in silicon photonic micro-cavities to realize photonic physical unclonable functions (PUFs), which are physical keys that cannot be copied or emulated. These PUFs have applications as unique sources of key material for information and hardware security.