Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemDirect Assembly of Large Area Nanoparticle Arrays(AMER CHEMICAL SOC, 2018-08)A major goal of nanotechnology is the assembly of nanoscale building blocks into functional optical, electrical, or chemical devices. Many of these applications depend on an ability to optically or electrically address single nanoparticles. However, positioning large numbers of single nanocrystals with nanometer precision on a substrate for integration into solid-state devices remains a fundamental roadblock. Here, we report fast, scalable assembly of thousands of single nanoparticles using electrophoretic deposition. We demonstrate that gold nanospheres down to 30 nm in size and gold nanorods <100 nm in length can be assembled into predefined patterns on transparent conductive substrates within a few seconds. We find that rod orientation can be preserved during deposition. As proof of high fidelity scale-up, we have created centimeter scale patterns comprising more than 1 million gold nanorods.
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ItemDirected Chemical Assembly of Single and Clustered Nanoparticles with Silanized Templates(AMER CHEMICAL SOC, 2018-06-26)The assembly of nanoscale materials into arbitrary, organized structures remains a major challenge in nanotechnology. Herein, we report a general method for creating 2D structures by combining top-down lithography with bottom-up chemical assembly. Under optimal conditions, the assembly of gold nanoparticles was achieved in less than 30 min. Single gold nanoparticles, from 10 to 100 nm, can be placed in predetermined patterns with high fidelity, and higher-order structures can be generated consisting of dimers or trimers. It is shown that the nanoparticle arrays can be transferred to, and embedded within, polymer films. This provides a new method for the large-scale fabrication of nanoparticle arrays onto diverse substrates using wet chemistry.
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ItemHot-Carrier Organic Synthesis via the Near-Perfect Absorption of Light(AMER CHEMICAL SOC, 2018-11-01)Photocatalysis enables the synthesis of valuable organic compounds by exploiting photons as a chemical reagent. Although light absorption is an intrinsic step, existing approaches rely on poorly absorbing catalysts that require high illumination intensities to afford enhanced efficiencies. Here, we demonstrate that a plasmonic metamaterial capable of near-perfect light absorption (94%) readily catalyzes a model organic reaction with a 29-fold enhancement in conversion relative to controls. The oxidation of benzylamine proceeds via a reactive iminium intermediate with high selectivity at ambient temperature and pressure, using only low-intensity visible irradiation. Control experiments demonstrated that only hot charge carriers produced following photoexcitation facilitate the formation of superoxide radicals, which, in turn, leads to iminium formation. Modeling shows that hot holes with energies that overlap with the highest-occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) of the reactant can participate and initiate the photocatalytic conversion. These results have important implications for hot-carrier photocatalysis and plasmon-hot-carrier extraction.
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ItemExperimental demonstration of infrared spectral reconstruction using plasmonic metasurfaces(OPTICAL SOC AMER, 2018-09-15)We computationally reconstruct short- to long-wave infrared spectra using an array of plasmonic metasurface filters. We illuminate the filter array with an unknown spectrum and measure the optical power transmitted through each filter with an infrared microscope to emulate a filter-detector array system. We then use the recursive least squares method to determine the unknown spectrum. We demonstrate our method with light from a blackbody. We also demonstrate it with spectra generated by passing the light from the blackbody through various materials. Our approach is a step towards miniaturized spectrometers spanning the short- to long-wave infrared based on filter-detector arrays.
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ItemSilicon microspectrometer chip based on nanostructured fishnet photodetectors with tailored responsivities and machine learning(Optical Society of America, 2019-09-20)The realization of on-chip microspectrometers would allow spectroscopy and colorimetry measurement systems to be readily incorporated into platforms for which size and weight are critical, such as consumer grade electronics, smartphones, and unmanned aerial vehicles. This would allow them to find use in diverse fields such as interior design, agriculture, and in machine vision applications. All spectrometers require a detector or detector array and optical elements for spectral discrimination. A single device that combines both detection and spectral discrimination functions therefore represents an ultimate limit of miniaturization. Motivated by this, we here experimentally demonstrate a novel nanostructured silicon-based photodetector design whose responsivity can be tailored by an appropriate choice of geometric parameters. We utilize a unique doping profile with two vertically stacked, back-to-back photodiode regions, which allows us to double the number of detectors in a given on-chip footprint. By patterning the top photosensitive regions of each device with two sets of interleaved vertical slab waveguide arrays of varied width and period, we define the absorption spectra (and thus responsivity spectra) of both the upper and lower photodiode regions. We then use twenty such “fishnet pixels” to form a microspectrometer chip and demonstrate the reconstruction of four test spectra using a two-stage supervised machine-learning-based reconstruction algorithm.
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ItemAlgorithmic approach for designing plasmonic nanotweezers(Optical Society of America, 2019-11-01)We use machine learning (simulated annealing) to design plasmonic nanoapertures that function as optical nanotweezers. The nanoapertures have irregular shapes that are chosen by our algorithm. We present electromagnetic simulations that show that these produce stronger field enhancements and extraction energies than nanoapertures comprising double nanoholes with the same gap geometry. We show that performance is further improved by etching one or more rings into the gold surrounding the nanoaperture. Lastly, we provide a direct comparison between our design and work that is representative of the state of the art in plasmonic nanotweezers at the time of writing.
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ItemMid- to long-wave infrared computational spectroscopy using a subwavelength coaxial aperture array(Nature Publishing Group, 2019-09-19)Miniaturized spectrometers are advantageous for many applications and can be achieved by what we term the filter-array detector-array (FADA) approach. In this method, each element of an optical filter array filters the light that is transmitted to the matching element of a photodetector array. By providing the outputs of the photodetector array and the filter transmission functions to a reconstruction algorithm, the spectrum of the light illuminating the FADA device can be estimated. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an array of 101 band-pass transmission filters that span the mid- to long-wave infrared (6.2 to 14.2 μm). Each filter comprises a sub-wavelength array of coaxial apertures in a gold film. As a proof-of-principle demonstration of the FADA approach, we use a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microscope to record the optical power transmitted through each filter. We provide this information, along with the transmission spectra of the filters, to a recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm that estimates the incident spectrum. We reconstruct the spectrum of the infrared light source of our FTIR and the transmission spectra of three polymer-type materials: polyethylene, cellophane and polyvinyl chloride. Reconstructed spectra are in very good agreement with those obtained via direct measurement by our FTIR system.