Yonghwi Kim

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Title	Electron and Ion Microscope Manager
Responsibilities	Scanning electron microscopes, focused ion beam, helium ion beam, AFM, profilometer
Email	ykim@caltech.edu
Phone	626-395-3371 (office)
Office	303 Steele

About

Role in the KNI

Yonghwi Kim is the Electron and Ion Microscope Manager at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at the California Institute of Technology. He oversees the daily operation of the Quanta scanning electron microscope (SEM) with environmental mode (ESEM), Sirion field emission SEM, Nova 600 focused ion beam (FIB), Zeiss ORION NanoFab helium/neon/gallium FIB, atomic force microscope, and profilometer. In this role, he trains researchers in equipment operation and provides technical support to enable impactful scientific discoveries.

Yonghwi joined Caltech in 2013 as a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering, conducting his doctoral research in Prof. Harry A. Atwater’s group on electrically reconfigurable nanophotonic devices based on phase-transition materials. After completing his Ph.D., he pursued postdoctoral research at NTT Research while serving as a Visiting Associate at Caltech, where he advanced nanofabrication methods for nonlinear optical waveguides in the KNI cleanroom. He returned to Caltech in 2025 to continue his technical career as the Electron and Ion Microscope Manager at the KNI.

Education

Yonghwi received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Caltech under the supervision of Prof. Harry A. Atwater. Prior to that, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, advised by Prof. Donghyun Kim.

List of Managed Instruments

Focused Ion Beam (FIB) Systems

Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEMs)

Scanning Probe Microscopes

Selected Publications

• Kim, Y. et al., “Phase Modulation with Electrically Tunable Vanadium Dioxide Phase-Change Metasurfaces,” Nano Letters, 2019.

• Kim, Y. et al., "Nanogap-based dielectric-specific colocalization for highly sensitive surface plasmon resonance detection of biotin-streptavidin interactions," Applied Physics Letters, 2012.

• Gao, R., Kelzenberg M. D., Kim, Y. et al., “Optical characterization of silicon nitride metagrating-based lightsails for self-stabilization,” ACS Photonics, 2022.

• Shayegan, K. J., Zhao, B., Kim, Y. et al., “Nonreciprocal infrared absorption via resonant magneto-optical coupling to InAs,” Science Advances, 2022.

• Kim, Y. et al., “Electrically Tunable Metasurfaces Incorporating A Phase Change Material,” U.S. Patent, 2024.