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Biography

Gabriel Santamaría-Botello is an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines. His group designs microwave and photonic integrated circuits for RF receivers, transceivers, and sensors. Much of this work centers on cavity electro-optic transducers in ferroelectric nanophotonic platforms such as thin-film lithium tantalate, which upconvert microwave signals to optical frequencies for low-noise receivers and quantum interconnects. His research spans microwave photonics, quantum sensing, superconducting circuits, remote sensing, radio astronomy, and computational electromagnetics. He is principal investigator on projects funded by DARPA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

He received his BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Carabobo and his PhD cum laude from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in 2021. His doctoral dissertation, on low-noise terahertz-optics parametric upconversion, included a research stay in the Resonant Optics group at the University of Otago. He then joined the Microwave and RF Research Group at the University of Colorado Boulder as a research associate, working on Rydberg-atom receivers and microwave radiometry, before moving to Mines in 2023. In 2024 he was a visiting professor at EPFL's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements.

Education

• BS, Electrical Engineering, University of Carabobo, 2014
• PH.D, Electrical Engineering, Charles III University of Madrid, 2021

Research

• Nonlinear and quantum optics
• Microwave and integrated photonics
• Low-noise mm-wave and THz sensing
• Superconducting circuits
• Computational Electromagnetics (MLFMM) 

Publications

• Gabriel Santamaria-Botello, Shane Verploegh, Eric Bottomley, Zoya Popovic, “Comparison of Noise Temperature of Rydberg-Atom and Electronic Microwave Receivers” https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.00908
• Gabriel Santamaría Botello, Florian Sedlmeir, Alfredo Rueda, Kerlos Atia Abdalmalak, Elliott R. Brown, Gerd Leuchs, Sascha Preu, Daniel Segovia-Vargas, Dmitry V. Strekalov, Luis Enrique García Muñoz, and Harald G. L. Schwefel, “Sensitivity limits of millimeter-wave photonic radiometers based on efficient electro-optic upconverters,” Optica 5, 1210-1219 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.5.001210
• Santamaría-Botello, G., Popovic, Z., Abdalmalak, K.A. et al. Sensitivity and noise in THz electro-optic upconversion radiometers. Sci Rep 10, 9403 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-65987-x
• R. Streeter, G. S. Botello, K. Hall and Z. Popović, “Correlation Radiometry for Subcutaneous Temperature Measurements,” in IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 230-237, June 2022, https://doi.org/10.1109/JERM.2021.3120320
• J. Lee, G. S. Botello, R. Streeter and Z. Popović, “Noninvasive Internal Body Thermometry With On-Chip GaAs Dicke Radiometer,” in IEEE Microwave and Wireless Technology Letters, https://doi.org/10.1109/LMWT.2023.3265806
• K. A. Abdalmalak et al., “Ultrawideband Conical Log-Spiral Circularly Polarized Feed for Radio Astronomy,” in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 1995-2007, March 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/TAP.2019.2949700
• G. A. Santamaría-Botello, L. E. García Muñoz, F. Sedlmeir, S. Preu, D. Segovia-Vargas, K. Atia Abdalmalak, S. Llorente Romano, A. García Lampérez, S. Malzer, G. H. Döhler, H. G. L. Schwefel, and H. B. Weber, “Maximization of the optical intra-cavity power of whispering-gallery mode resonators via coupling prism,” Opt. Express 24, 26503-26514 (2016) https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.24.026503

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