Purdue ECE Student Xueji Wang named 2022 DARPA Riser
A PhD student in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been selected as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Riser for 2022. Xueji Wang will participate in the DARPA’s Forward conference series, which aims to provide networking opportunities to discover and engage new communities of talent.
“I feel very honored to be named as a DARPA riser”, said Wang, “I am looking forward to presenting our work during the DARPA Forward Conference.”
Currently a member of Prof. Zubin Jacob's research group (electrodynamics.org), Wang’s research involves various aspects of thermal radiation engineering. Thermal radiation is an omnipresent phenomenon in the universe, as all objects constantly radiate infrared electromagnetic energy. Controlling and detecting this thermal radiation is of vital importance for various modern-world applications, ranging from energy conversion and information processing to machine vision and autonomous navigation. Especially, detecting thermal radiation with imaging sensors has proven to be an important technology frontier, as thermal radiation becomes the only light source when no external illumination is present. Additionally, thermal radiation contains rich information of objects, including temperature, material fingerprint, and 3D surface morphology. However, current techniques suffer from significant information loss because the detected heat signal is unavoidably mixed with environmental object emission, which also constantly emits and scatters thermal radiation.
To extract the hidden information in thermal radiation, Wang and his colleagues established a system to detect thermal radiation with simultaneous spectral and polarimetric resolution. Exploiting the dispersion and polarization modulation in novel imaging-compatible photonic devices, they provide an advanced solution to solve the long-standing issues of robust and portable high-performance thermal imaging.