NEWLY FUNDED PROJECTS
Gary Eden is leading a $ 7.5 million MURI project to cool solid-state lasers internally to increase beam quality.
John Dallesasse is leading a $ 2.5 million NSF-SRC project to develop chip-level photonic device technology.
Kevin Kim and Hyungsoo Choi received $ 427,000 in DARPA funding to apply a novel nano-assembly technique for making wafer-scale infra-red detectors.
ECE Professor Gary Eden is leading a team of university researchers that is working to cool solid-state lasers internally to increase beam quality. Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through a $ 7.5 million Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative( MURI) grant, the project is a collaboration with researchers from Clemson University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. MNTL affiliate Peter Dragic is also part of the team. In order to scale the power of high-power lasers beyond the 1 kilowatt-level, researchers need to find a way to remove heat, whose build up very quickly impacts beam quality in a negative way. One viable way to reduce thermal load in specific laser materials is through radiation balancing. However, this and other approaches to reducing the temperature of a gain medium in a spatially-uniform manner are only in their infancy, so Eden’ s team will develop optical and phonon-based processes capable of cooling the gain medium locally.
In August, the National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corporation awarded ECE Professor John Dallesasse a $ 2.5 million grant to develop a chip-level photonic device technology for transmitting and processing information at the chip level. Dallesasse and his team will use the transistor laser as the building block for high-speed optical links and electronic-photonic digital logic circuits, enabling faster and more energy efficient chip-to-chip communications and signal / information processing within racks of servers inside data centers. Dallesasse and ECE Associate Professor Lynford Goddard are forming the photonic interconnects and switching capabilities. Other MNTL-affiliated faculty include: Milton Feng, who will develop the transistor laser, and Jean-Pierre Leburton, who will perform device modeling. The team is also optimizing the transistor laser to create a simple photonic logic element and supporting information processing architecture, which could reduce the power consumption by 100 times per processing operation and someday enhance supercomputing and information and image processing for homeland security.
ECE faculty Kevin Kim and Hyungsoo Choi received a $ 427,000 grant from the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency( DARPA) to apply a novel nano-assembly technique for making wafer-scale infra-red detectors( WIRED). These detectors, which range from short- to long-range across the infra-red spectrum, will be deployed in low-cost cameras for surveillance and reconnaissance( ISR) applications such as aerial drones and enhanced night vision goggles that can see through windows, and even differentiate between different kinds of foliage. Conventional detector fabrication technology involves several manual processing steps, including singledye processes, that makes the resulting cameras too expensive for many applications. Working with industry partner Northrop-Grumman, Kim and his team will be using the flow-limited field-injection electrostatic spraying( FFESS) technique that his group invented more than 10 years ago to precisely deposit inorganic material on nanostructures. FFESS has the inherent flexibility and advantages that make it most suitable for large-area and roll-to-roll deposition with no need for a vacuum environment; it also allows the efficient use of deposition material and the convenient and precise control of the stoichiometry. As a result, FFESS deposition is not only versatile but it is highly cost-effective.
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