JQI Student Receives UMD Graduate School’s Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award

JQI graduate student Supratik Sarkar received the University of Maryland Graduate School’s Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award for the 2025 academic year.

Each year, the UMD Graduate School selects around 80 of the roughly 4,000 graduate assistants working on campus to recognize their outstanding contributions to the university community. As part of the award, some of Sarkar’s university fees will be covered for the spring semester.

Sarkar is a member of the research group led by JQI Fellow Mohammad Hafezi, who nominated him for the award. With Hafezi and other colleagues, Sarkar performs experiments exploring new frontiers of photonics, the study and use of photons—particles of light. In his graduate research, Sarkar has studied the ways light interacts with materials and how it can sometimes change their properties. He has also designed photonic integrated circuits, which are similar to the circuits used in computers and other electronics but that rely on manipulating photons instead of electrons.

“I want to sincerely thank my supervisor, Professor Mohammad Hafezi, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for nominating me for this award,” Sarkar says. “I am deeply grateful to my exceptional colleagues and mentors in the Hafezi Lab over the years, and for the opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge research in photonics, many-body physics, and light–matter interactions.”

In 2025, Sarkar was the first author of an article describing a new device that directs the energy of laser light into narrow spaces. The chip manipulates light to concentrate its energy in a smaller space than can be achieved using freely traveling light, which allows researchers to focus the energy more efficiently on a material sample. The technique can create interactions between light and matter at tiny scales using less power than previous methods, and it avoids heating up the sample.

He has also worked on other projects, including developing a device to convert one color of light into a rainbow of many colors and investigating the dramatic shifts in a material’s electrical properties that researchers can induce using light.

The devices that Sarkar and his colleagues are developing have potential applications in a variety of areas, including metrology, photonic computing, and machine learning. While the devices use new principles of photonics, Sarkar has helped design the chips so that they should be easy to mass-produce using techniques that are already common, which makes them a convenient approach for incorporating into commercial devices.

In addition to research, Sarkar has also been active in community outreach. He has participated in scientific demonstrations for the public during UMD’s annual open house, Maryland Day, and has given tours to groups visiting Hafezi’s labs to learn about the research being conducted at JQI.

Story by Bailey Bedford