Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is a professor of applied mathematics in MIT’s Department of Mathematics. He works in the field of nanophotonics — electromagnetism in media structured on the wavelength scale, especially in the infrared and optical regimes — where he works on many aspects of the theory, design, and computational modeling of nanophotonic devices, both classical and quantum. He has published more than 200 papers and 25 patents, including the second edition of the textbook Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light. He has also distributed several widely used free-software packages for scientific computation, including the MPB and Meep electromagnetic simulation tools and the FFTW fast Fourier transform library (for which he received the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software). He earned a BS in physics, mathematics, and electrical engineering and computer science, and a PhD in physics, from MIT.

Publications

• Bayati, E., Pestourie, R., Colburn, S., Lin, Z., Johnson, S.G., Majumdar, A. (2020). Inverse designed metalenses with extended depth of focus. ACS Photonics.
• Christiansen, R.E., Michon, J., Benzaouia, M., Sigmund, O., Johnson, S.G. (2020). Inverse design of nanoparticles for enhanced Raman scattering. Optics Express, vol. 28, pp. 4444–4462.
• Hu, M., Wang, F., Huo, P., Pan, X., Johnson, S.G., Fink, Y., Deng, D. (2019). Nanoparticle-mediated cavitation via CO₂ laser impacting on water: Concentration effect, temperature visualization, and core-shell structures. Scientific Reports, vol. 9, p. 18326.
• Chevalier, P., Armizhan, A., Wang, F., Piccardo, M., Johnson, S.G., Capasso, F., Everitt, H.O. (2019). Widely tunable compact terahertz gas lasers. Science, vol. 366, pp. 856–860.

Media

• November 14, 2019: MIT News, Researchers generate terahertz laser with laughing gas.
• May 21, 2019: MIT News, Mathematical technique quickly tunes next-generation lenses.