Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

A platform capable of seamlessly unifying both optoelectrowetting and optoelectronic tweezers is presented. This enables the user to manipulate aqueous droplets (with electrowetting) as well as individual particles within those droplets (with dielectrophoresis). The device requires no photolithography and droplet/particle manipulation can occur continuously over the entire surface of the device.

Project end date: 08/19/11

Solar energy represents one of the most abundant and yet least harvested source of renewable energy. We report a PV structure that incorporates 3D, single crystalline n-CdS nanopillars, embedded in poly- crystalline thin films of p-CdTe, to enable high absorption of light and efficient collection of the carriers. Through experiments and modeling, we demonstrate the potency of this approach for enabling highly versatile solar modules on both rigid and flexible substrates with enhanced carrier collection efficiency arising from the geometric configuration of the NPLs. We performed...

Many semiconductor-based nanolaser cavities using metal have been remarkably reported in past few years. However, the efficient coupling of these small cavities to waveguides still remains a large challenge. Here, we show highly efficient coupling of a wavelength-scale III-V metal-clad high-quality nanolaser cavity operating the fundamental dielectric cavity-mode to a silicon-on-insulator waveguide. By engineering the effective refractive-index and the field distribution of the cavity mode, the quality factor is maximized as 1700 with a modal volume of 0.28 (lambda/n)^3. Furthermore...

The physical size and effective modal volume of conventional lasers with visible and near-infrared emission wavelengths are usually in the micrometer range due to the diffraction limit. The length scale of electronic transistors, however, is currently sub-100 nm thanks to the advance of fabrication technologies. For future integration of electronic and photonic devices on a chip-scale platform, we need novel laser sources that are not only compact but also capable of steering light in any direction necessary and potentially electrically injectable. In this project, a nanopatch laser...