Supervisor:  Martijn Heck

The age of electronics-only technology is sufficient for consumer products is soon over. In many ways, classical electronics are physically limited, such as the quantum limit, resistance, binary only, bandwidth etc. putting a barrier on how far the technology can be pushed. Thus many different technologies are being developed in hope of them being able to take over where classical electronics fail. Such fields include quantum computers, super conductors and Microwave Photonics. Microwave photonics is a combination field of photonic and microwave technologies, two technologies central in today’s society. In this Colloquium I will give an introduction to microwave photonics is and why it is an important field. I will proceed to present the subject of my thesis, “simulation and characterisation of Microwave Photodetectors”, going through and explaining how they work as well as presenting experimental data and simulation techniques.