Malik Rakhmanov
Associate Professor
Ph.D. in Physics, California Institute of Technology, 2000
B.S. in Physics, Moscow State University, 1989
Office: Cavalry 105-D, Brownsville Campus
Lab: SETB 1.460, Brownsville Campus
Phone: (956) 882 6746 (office) and(956) 882 6534 (lab)
Email: malik.rakhmanov@utrgv.edu
Teaching
Course: Computational Methods for Engineers and Physicists
Office hours: Mon, Wed: 1:30 – 3:00, Tue: 1:00 – 3:00
Research
Dr. Rakhmanov has been involved in LIGO since 1994 and participated in many stages of its development. He was stationed at the LIGO Hanford Observatory in 1998—2000 to work on Input Optics and also in 2005—2007 to participate in the commissioning of LIGO detectors and the development of algorithms for searches of burst gravitational waves. Dr. Rakhmanov conducts research in several areas of physics related to gravitational-wave detection, including general relativity, optics and interferometry, and statistical analysis of data. More recently, Dr. Rakhmanov began research in silicon nanophotonics studying properties of on-chip silicon waveguides and micro-ring resonators in collaboration with Rice University. This research involves fabrication of silicon nanophotonic devices with e-beam lithography in shared facilities and conducting device characterization with experiments in the lab. Silicon micro-ring resonators are used as optical switches, narrow-band filters, high-speed modulators and are main building blocks of integrated nanophotonic circuits and photonic logic for optical signal processing and optical computing. The experiments are complemented with computer modeling using the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulation. Computationally intensive FDTD tasks utilize parallel processing license from RSoft (Synopsys Inc.) installed on HPC on campus at UTRGV. FDTD is a key tool for analyzing the propagation of electromagnetic waves in metamaterials, photonic crystals, micro-ring resonators, and other nanophotonic devices.