NanoPlasmonics, Microphotonics & Imaging

Research that includes:

  • Polymer, printed optical lenslet arrays
  • Microfluidic tuneable photopolymer lenses
  • Optical switches and planar lightwave MEMS
  • Vertically integrated microconfocal arrays
  • Bio-inspired integration of tuneable polymer optics with imaging electronics

BPN878: Scalable Synthesis of Core-Vest Nanoparticles Assisted by Surface Plasmons

Siyi Cheng
Arthur O. Montazeri
2018

Compared with single-component nanocrystals, core-shell nanocrystals show better performance in various areas, such as energy harvesting and storage, catalysis, sensing and functionalized targeted cell therapy. The solution-based fabrication process is the most common strategy for synthesizing core-shell structures. However, the complex and difficult-to-scale fabrication procedures severely reduce their practical applications. Besides, the thermodynamically driven process of the fabrication of core-shell nanostructures possesses several constraints on their size and geometry, the...

BPN892: Wearable Muscle Diagnostic System for Sports Monitoring Based On pMUT Arrays

Hong Ding
Yue Liang
2018

Muscle disorders, such as hematoma and atrophy, are major medical concerns stemming from the results of heavy muscles works such as intensive manual labors and physical exercises. For example, about 30% of sports injuries are related to muscles and it has been challenging to monitor the muscles usages and conditions with real-time feedback to avoid the extensive usages of muscles. From the perspective of availability, cost, and simplicity, ultrasonic imaging is a better route than technologies such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for muscle disorder...

BPN458: Optical Antenna-Based nanoLED

Kevin Han
Seth Fortuna
Matin Amani
2019

Spontaneous emission has been considered slower and weaker than stimulated emission. As a result, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have only been used in applications with bandwidth 1 GHz. Spontaneous emission is inefficient because the radiating dipole is much smaller than the wavelength and such short dipoles are poor radiators. By attaching an optical antenna to the radiating dipole at the nanoscale, the emission rate can be significantly increased, enabling high modulation bandwidths theoretically 100 GHz. This project focuses on the physical demonstration of this new type of...

BPN788: MEMS-Actuated Grating-Based Optical Phased Array for LIDAR

Xiaosheng Zhang
2019

Optical phased array (OPA) devices that uses diffraction to steer an optical beam have found applications ranging from light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical (FSO) communications, optical switches, holographic display, biomedical imaging, etc. We aim to integrate the OPA system into the application of automobile navigation, which is currently primarily dominated by opto-mechanical scanning based systems, which are usually bulky and relatively slow thus cannot provide the steering speeds and versatility necessary for many applications. Traditional OPAs are usually...

BPN809: Online Optical Regulation and Photocurrent Sensor for Monitoring Microalgal Bioreactor System

Wonseok Kim
Youngseop Lee
2019

Optogenetic technology, which utilizes light to control genetically encoded light sensitive ion channels and pumps, has made a significant impact on neuroscience and neurotechnology since it allows to modulate selective neurons. Even though it is an ideal technology for numerous biological researches, irreversible and permanent gene modifications of biological tissues by lentriviral vectors in optogenetics hinder many real...

BPN397: Electrothermally-Actuated Free-Space Board-To-Board Optical Interconnect With Zero Power Hold

Jeffrey B. Chou
K. Yu
2010

Free-space optical interconnect using arrays of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and photoreceivers can significantly increase the board-to-board interconnect bandwidth, relieving the bottleneck of traditional backplane systems in computer servers. However, critical alignment errors, due to insertion variation, have prevented the deployment of such a technology. We present an adaptive free-space optical interconnect using electrothermal MEMS rotational lens scanners with zero power hold to circumvent such difficulties. Previous groups have attempted to adaptively...