Congratulations to Hang Lu on a Successful Ph.D. Defense
We are delighted to announce that Dr. Hang Lu has successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled
“Cavity-Engineered VCSELs with Integrated Photodetectors for Optical Entropy and Security”, and officially earned her doctorate!
Dr. Lu's research addresses a novel approach to optical entropy generation and security using cavity-engineered VCSELs with integrated photodetectors. By introducing non-circular and symmetry-broken cavity geometries, her work systematically modifies the spatial mode structure, coherence properties, and polarization behavior of VCSELs, generating broadband temporal fluctuations and intrinsic optical chaos without relying on external modulation or complex feedback architectures.
Her thesis exploits this chaotic emission through two security-relevant pathways: high-quality physical random number generation in the temporal domain, and optical physical unclonable functions for hardware authentication in the spatial domain. To progress toward chip-scale realizations, Hang further investigated the integration of cavity-engineered VCSELs with on-chip photodetectors, enabling compact and direct electrical extraction of optical entropy. Collectively, these contributions establish cavity-engineered VCSELs with integrated photodetectors as a unified and scalable photonic platform for optical entropy generation and security — bridging cavity-engineered laser physics, nonlinear dynamics, and integrated photonic systems.
Hang has been an invaluable member of the Photonics Laboratory, and we are incredibly proud of this achievement. Please join us in congratulating her on this well-deserved milestone — we look forward to seeing her continued contributions to the field!
