Affiliate – Now at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
I am interested in the general area of electromagnetism and have worked on diverse problems in this area.
In a nutshell, I am working on finite element modeling of microwave electromagnetic scattering from rough surfaces with heterogeneous sub-surface compositions for remote sensing applications. These applications include not just the determination of surface properties, but also sub-surface sensing. Land, water, and ice bodies are equally amenable to analysis.
In recent work, we examined the role of varying sub-surface soil moisture on the radar image of a given area. This is particularly important in the context of NASA missions such as AirMOSS and SMAP which attempt to estimate soil moisture from remotely sensed data. In yet another project, we applied our computational electromagnetic tools to study the unusually bright radar returns from an icy satellite of Saturn, Enceladus. This data was collected by the Cassini mission, and the context in which this finding is important is that similar icy regions on Earth are not found to have such high radar returns.
For my PhD, I worked on the electromagnetic modelling and design of optical photonic-crystal cavities for experiments in cavity quantum electrodynamics, in collaboration with the QNOS group at the University of Arizona. I have also worked extensively on the fabrication of these devices using electron-beam lithography and ion-beam etching.
A brief biography
- Post-doctoral Scholar at the University of Southern California, September 2012 – September 2013. Mentored by Dr. Mahta Moghaddam, Microwave Systems, Sensors, and Imaging Laboratory (MiXIL).
- Caltech Post-doctoral Scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, January 2011 – August 2012. Mentored by Dr. Jakob van Zyl.
- Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Physics at the California Institute of Technology, June 2005 – June 2010. Dissertation: “Photon confinement in photonic crystal cavities” (link, PDF). Advised by Dr. Axel Scherer, Caltech Nanofabrication group.
- M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, June 2010.
- B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, June 2001 – May 2005.
Publications
Journals
- A mesh reconfiguration scheme for speeding up Monte Carlo simulations of electromagnetic scattering by random rough surfaces
Uday K Khankhoje and Thomas A Cwik; Computer Physics Communications; March 2013 (in-press). DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2013.03.005. - Computation of radar scattering from heterogeneous rough soil using the finite element method.
Uday K Khankhoje, Jakob van Zyl, and Thomas Cwik; IEEE Transcations of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 51, Issue 6, 2012. DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2012.2225431 - Progress in growth, fabrication, and characterization of semiconductor photonic crystal nanocavities.
Richards, B. C., Hendrickson, J., Olitzky, J. D., Gibson, R., Gehl, M., Kieu, K., Polynkin, P., Khitrova, G., Gibbs, H. M.; Khankhoje, U. K., Homyk, A., Scherer, A.; Kim, J.-Y. and Lee, Y.-H.; Physica Status Solidi (b), Vol. 248, Issue 4, pp. 892–896, April 2011. DOI: 10.1002/pssb.201000853. - Characterization of 1D Photonic Crystal Nanobeam Cavities Using Curved Microfiber.
B. C. Richards, J. Hendrickson, J. D. Olitzky, R. Gibson, M. Gehl, K. Kieu; U. K. Khankhoje, A. Homyk, A. Scherer; J.-Y. Kim, Y.-H. Lee, G. Khitrova, and H. M. Gibbs; Optics Express, Vol. 18, Issue 20, pp. 20558-20564, 2010. DOI: 10.1364/OE.18.020558. - Modelling and Fabrication of GaAs Photonic-Crystal Cavities for Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics. U K Khankhoje, S-H Kim, B C Richards, J Hendrickson, J Sweet, J D Olitzky, G Khitrova, H M Gibbs and A Scherer; Nanotechnology 21, 065202 (7pp), 2010. DOI: 10.1088/0957-4484/21/6/065202
- GaAs photonic crystal slab nanocavities: growth, fabrication, and quality factor.
J. Sweet, B. C. Richards, J. D. Olitzky, J. Hendrickson, G. Khitrova, H. M. Gibbs; D. Litvinov, D. Gerthsen, D. Z. Hu, D. M. Schaadt, M. Wegener; U. Khankhoje, and A. Scherer; Photonics and Nanostructures – Fundamentals and Applications, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-6, 2010. DOI: 10.1016/j.photonics.2009.10.004. - Optimal Fractional Fourier Domains for Quadratic Chirps. Uday Khankhoje, V. M. Gadre; IETE Journal of Research, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 65-70, January-February 2006.
Conferences
- On the accuracy of sub-pixel backscatter averaging for bare soils
Uday K Khankhoje, Mariko Burgin, and Mahta Moghaddam; 13th URSI Commission F Triennial Open Symposium on Radiowave Propagation and Remote Sensing, Ottawa, Canada, April 29- May 3 2013 (Invited talk). - Enceladus’ Brilliant Surface: RADAR Modeling
U. K. Khankhoje, K. L. Mitchell, J. C. Castillo-Rogez, M. Janssen; 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Lunar & Planetary Institute, Houston at The Woodlands, Texas, March 18-22 2013. Abstract #2531. - Enceladus’ Brilliant Surface: Cassini RADAR observations & interpretation
K. L. Mitchell, U. K. Khankhoje, J. C. Castillo, S. D. Wall and the Cassini RADAR Team; 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, Lunar & Planetary Institute, Houston at The Woodlands, Texas, March 18-22 2013. Abstract #2902. - Using Polarimetric Sar Data To Infer Soil Moisture From Surfaces With Varying Subsurface Moisture Profiles.
Uday Khankhoje, Jakob van Zyl, Yunjin Kim, Thomas Cwik; IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (IGARSS) 2012, Munich, Germany July 2012 - Estimating soil moisture from a varying subsurface profile.
Jakob van Zyl, Yunjin Kim, Uday Khankhoje; IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (IGARSS) 2011 in Vancouver, Canada, July 25-29 2011. - Fabrication and characterization of one-dimensional photonic crystal nanobeam cavities in Si.
B. Richards, J. Hendrickson, J. D. Olitzky, R. Gibson, K. Kieu, G. Khitrova, H. Gibbs, U. Khankhoje, A. Homyk, A. Scherer, J.-Y. Kim, and Y.-H. Lee; Nonlinear Optics and Excitation Kinetics in Semiconductors (NOEKS) in Paderborn, Germany, August 2010. - Design and Fabrication of an Electrically Pumped 1D Nanobeam Laser in GaAs.
Uday K. Khankhoje, Jingqing Huang, Axel Scherer; Photonics in Switching, OSA Technical Digest (CD) (Optical Society of America), paper JTuB42, July 2010. - The Evolution from III-V Opto-Electronics to Silicon Nanophotonics and Vertical Cavity Lasers to Photonic Crystal and Surface Plasmon Devices.
Axel Scherer, Uday Khankhoje, Tom Baehr-Jones, and Se-Heon Kim; International Optical Design Conference, OSA Technical Digest (CD) (Optical Society of America), paper IMA1, June 2010. - Fabrication and Characterization of Slab Microcavities.
U. Khankhoje, A. Scherer; D. Litvinov, D. Gerthsen, M. Wegener; G. Khitrova, J. Sweet, B. C. Richards, J. Hendrickson, and H. M. Gibbs. The 39th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics, Snowbird Utah, January 2009. - Emission Characteristics of Quantum Dots in Photonic Crystal Nanocavities.
B. C. Richards, J. Hendrickson, J. Sweet, C. Christenson, M. Pajor, D. Lam, G. Khitrova, H. M. Gibbs; A. Scherer, U. Khankhoje. Montana Meeting on Fundamental Optical Processes in Semiconductors (FOPS), July 2007.