David A. Horsley (Advisor)

A variety of physical mechanisms have been exploited to capture electronic images of a human fingerprint, including optical, capacitive, pressure, and acoustic mechanisms. Compared to other technologies, ultrasonic fingerprint sensors have two major advantages (1) they are insensitive to contamination and moisture on the finger (2) they have the ability to measure images at multiple depths hundreds of microns from the sensor surface. With the maturity of the thin film piezoelectric materials technology and MEMS-CMOS eutectic wafer-bonding process, piezoelectric micromachined...

A large, ordered nanocup array was fabricated and optically characterized. A novel fabrication method that combined Nanoimprint lithography (NIL), soft lithography, and shadow evaporation was designed to create asymmetric nanoparticles in a large (0.5cm x 1cm) array with subwavelength features. Although this fabrication procedure can be used to create many different types of asymmetric nanostructures that are useful in various plasmonic applications, here we fabricated a periodic nanocup array...