About

Professor Ming Tang is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, where he received an outstanding thesis award for his dissertation on 'Thermodynamic and Morphological Transitions in Crystalline and Soft Materials Interfaces.' His early career included positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow and staff scientist, followed by work at Shell Oil as a materials and corrosion engineer, focusing on applying materials science and novel technologies to solve practical materials and corrosion problems in the oil and gas industry. Since joining Rice University in 2015, Professor Tang has been engaged in research within the field of mesoscale materials science, contributing to the understanding and development of advanced materials.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Physics
• Optics
• Telecommunications
• Engineering
• Materials science
• Electronic engineering
• Quantum mechanics

Selected publications

• Nonlinear Fourier transform enabled eigenvalue spectrum investigation for fiber laser radiation

  Photonics Research · 2021 · 78 citations

  • Optics
  • Physics
  • Materials science

  Fiber lasers are a paradigm of dissipative systems, which distinguish themselves from a Hamilton system where energy is conservative. Consequently, pulses generated in a fiber laser are always accompanied by the continuous wave (CW). Under certain hypothesis, pulses generated in a fiber laser can be considered as a soliton, a product of a Hamilton system. Therefore, all the descriptions of solitons of a fiber laser are approximate. Coexistence of solitons and the CW from a fiber laser prevents unveiling of real nonlinear dynamics in fiber lasers, such as soliton interactions. Pulse behavior in a fiber laser can be represented by the state of single pulse, the state of period doubling of single pulse, the states of two pulses either tightly bound or loosely distributed, the states of three pulses, and various combinations of the above-mentioned states. Recently, soliton distillation was proposed and numerically demonstrated based on the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) [ J. Lightwave Technol. 39 , 2542 ( 2021 ) JLTEDG0 733-8724 10.1109/JLT.2021.3051036 ]. Solitons can be separated from the coherent CW background. Therefore, it is feasible to isolate solitons from CW background in a fiber laser. Here, we applied the NFT to various pulses generated in a fiber laser, including single pulse, single pulse in period doubling, different double pulses, and multiple pulses. Furthermore, with the approach of soliton distillation, the corresponding pure solitons of those pulses are reconstructed. Simulation results suggest that the NFT can be used to identify soliton dynamics excluding CW influence in a fiber laser, which paves a new way for uncovering real soliton interaction in nonlinear systems.

  DOI

• Real-Time Demonstration of Homodyne Coherent Bidirectional Transmission for Next-Generation Data Center Interconnects

  Journal of Lightwave Technology · 2021 · 108 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Electronic engineering
  • Computer Science

  We experimentally propose and demonstrate homodyne coherent detection in a short-distance data center interconnect with bidirectional fiber transmission. The transmitter in the proposed system sends the modulated signal and a continuous wave (CW) tone originating from the same laser diode (LD) over the 2 lanes of a duplex fiber to the remote receiver for coherent detection. Thus, this system allows the use of an uncooled LD with a large linewidth and reduces the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) compared to that in a classical coherent system. A successful real-time demonstration with 600-Gb/s DP-64QAM using uncooled large-linewidth DFB lasers is conducted. Automatic stabilization against polarization fluctuations of the transmitted tone is achieved by the proposed polarization-tracking integrated coherent receiver in compact silicon photonics (SiP), tracking up to 300 rad/s without a performance penalty. The phase noise caused by mismatch and the link loss budget limitations are discussed and analyzed. This study shows that the proposed system is a potentially attractive solution for future 800G and 1.6T intra-data-center optical interconnects.

  DOI

• Distributed multicore fiber sensors

  Opto-Electronic Advances · 2020 · 75 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Optics

  Multicore fiber (MCF) which contains more than one core in a single fiber cladding has attracted ever increasing attention for application in optical sensing systems owing to its unique capability of independent light transmission in multiple spatial channels. Different from the situation in standard single mode fiber (SMF), the fiber bending gives rise to tangential strain in off-center cores, and this unique feature has been employed for directional bending and shape sensing, where strain measurement is achieved by using either fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) or Brillouin distributed sensing technique. On the other hand, the parallel spatial cores enable space-division multiplexed (SDM) system configuration that allows for the multiplexing of multiple distributed sensing techniques. As a result, multi-parameter sensing or performance enhanced sensing can be achieved by using MCF. In this paper, we review the research progress in MCF based distributed fiber sensors. Brief introductions of MCF and the multiplexing/de-multiplexing methods are presented. The bending sensitivity of off-center cores is analyzed. Curvature and shape sensing, as well as various SDM distributed sensing using MCF are summarized, and the working principles of diverse MCF sensors are discussed. Finally, we present the challenges and prospects of MCF for distributed sensing applications.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Songnian Fu

  869 shared

• Deming Liu

  849 shared

• Perry Ping Shum

  Southern University of Science and Technology

  318 shared

• Zhiyong Zhao

  Jilin University

  247 shared

• Can Zhao

  244 shared

• Lei Deng

  Jinyintan Hospital

  210 shared

• Hao Wu

  187 shared

• Weijun Tong

  Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  163 shared

Labs

• Mesoscale Materials Science GroupPI

Education

• Ph.D, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

  Nanyang Technological University

  2005

• Bachelor of Engineering, Department of Optoelectronics

  Huazhong University of Science and Technology

  2001

Awards & honors

• DOE Early Career Award (2018)
• Rice University School of Engineering Teaching and Research…
• American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral N…

Similar researchers at Rice University

• Menachem Elimelechh-209
• Pulickel Ajayanh-204
• James Tourh-178
• Naomi J. Halash-173
• Frank Geurtsh-157