Charles Roques-Carmes

Charles is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests include nanophotonics, light-matter-free-electron interactions, machine learning, complexity theory, quantum electrodynamics, and electron beam physics. His research contributions include the demonstration of novel nanophotonic light sources driven by free electrons, photonic computing architectures for complex optimization, and photonic devices to control light at the nanoscale (called metasurfaces). The MATLAB interface—enabling the simultaneous writing of scripts, decoding, evaluating variables in the command line, and plotting—has been instrumental in the design and analysis of his work on polarization-insensitive dielectric-based metasurfaces and on light emission from all-silicon substrates. In particular, MATLAB’s library of optimization algorithms proved extremely helpful in the correction of chromatic aberrations in dielectric metasurfaces, since the design of such metasurfaces requires the optimization of a complicated constraint function at various wavelengths of operation. More recently, he developed an algorithm called the Photonic Recurrent Ising Sampler (PRIS) that can solve NP-hard optimization problems by performing iterative matrix multiplications. While working on the experimental demonstration of the proposed concept with photonic components, he relied on MATLAB’s computational speed for large-scale matrix multiplications to numerically investigate the performance of the algorithm. MATLAB’s Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms enabled him to test the PRIS on large-scale, real-life problems, thus showing its promising performance on a set of benchmark Ising problems. Charles earned a BS in physics from École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France.