Biography
Nick earned his Ph.D in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesis focused on light-matter interactions in nanophotonic structures. He then moved to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he worked on developing sources of quantum light such as squeezed states. In 2025, Nick will join the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell, where his lab will focus on developing novel light sources at new frequencies using nonlinear effects, as well as developing and applying quantum light sources for sensitive measurements.
Research Interests
Selected Publications
- Nicholas Rivera, Jamison Sloan, Yannick Salamin, John D. Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić. "Creating large Fock states and massively squeezed states in optics using systems with nonlinear bound states in the continuum." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
- Charles Roques-Carmes, Nicholas Rivera, Ali Ghorashi, Steven Kooi, Yi Yang, Zin Lin, Justin Beroz, Nicolas Romeo, John D., Joannopoulos, Ido Kaminer, Steven G. Johnson, and Marin Soljačić. "A general framework for scintillation in nanophotonics." Science (2022).
- Nicholas Rivera and Ido Kaminer. "Light-matter interactions with photonic quasiparticles" Nature Reviews Physics (2020).
- Nicholas Rivera, Liang Jie Wong, John D. Joannopoulos, Marin Soljačić, and Ido Kaminer. “Light emission based on nanophotonic vacuum forces.” Nature Physics (2019).
- Nicholas Rivera, Ido Kaminer, Bo Zhen, John D. Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić. "Shrinking light to allow forbidden transitions on the atomic scale." Science (2016).
Selected Awards and Honors
Tingye Li Innovation Prize, Optica (2024)
Andrew M. Lockett III Memorial Fund Award, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2022)
Junior Fellowship, Harvard Society of Fellows (2021)
LeRoy Apker Award, Americal Physical Society (2016)
Education
Ph.D. in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022
Bachelor of Science in Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016