NanoTechnology: Materials, Processes & Devices

Research that includes:

  • Development of nanostructure fabrication technology
  • Nanomagnetics, Microphotonics
  • CMOS Integrated Nanowires/Nanotubes (CMOS-Inn)

BPN989: Defect-Induced Piezoelectricity in Silicon

Zihuai Zhang
Kadircan Godeneli
2024

Silicon, a mature platform for the semiconductor industry, has become a leading platform for future quantum technologies. As a high-purity material, it serves as a low-noise host for a variety of quantum defects. As a low-loss material, it is a desirable substrate and material platform for next generation quantum devices. However, the lack of piezoelectricity in silicon, due to its centro-symmetric structure, poses challenges for its electromechanical applications. For example, one common approach to realize electromechanics in silicon relies on hybrid integration with a different...

BPNX1000: Atomic Force Nanomechanical Qubit (New Project)

Shahin Jahanbani
Binhan Hua
Kadircan Godeneli
Haoxin Zhou
Zihuai Zhang
2024

Ultralong lifetimes of silicon nanomechanical resonators at cryogenic temperatures and microwave frequencies make them promising resources in quantum engineering. In this work, we propose a nanomechanical qubit achieving strong single-phonon level anharmonicity of 5 MHz without the need for coupling to an ancillary qubit of a hybrid quantum architecture. This qubit design combines a nano-machined silicon cantilever brought in proximity to a silicon surface using microelectromechanical actuators. The surface forces between the cantilever and the silicon surface provide an effective...

BPN837: Metal Oxide-Coated Carbonized-Silicon Nanowires as High-Performance Micro-Supercapacitor

Dr. Yuan Gao
Sinem Ortaboy
Chuan-Pei Lee
2016

With the rapid development of modern digital technology, micro-supercapacitors show tremendous potential to complement or replace conventional electrolytic capacitors and batteries due to their small dimension, high power density, high electrochemical efficiency and long cyclic life. In particular, porous silicon nanowires (PSiNWs) and their derivatives have attracted great attention owing to their high surface areas and ease of integration with the microfabrication methodology. In this project, we are developing a novel metal oxide-coated carbonized PSiNWs electrodes for micro-...

BPN988: Modulation of Optoelectronics in Quantum Dot Film

I K M Reaz Rahman
Naoki Higashitarumizu
2023

Core/shell quantum dots are known to have high photoluminescence quantum yield for their passivation through thicker shell by suppressing surface trap states. In spite of their excellent exciton dynamics, these bright quantum dots tend to suffer from stability issues and degradation over time. Here we investigate their photo-physical properties due to charge injection, which leads to unfavorable recombination pathways through charged excitons. This provides an additional tuning knob for modulation of their photoluminescence quantum yield after synthesis, thereby offering a means of...

BPN940: Self-Healing Materials for Sensing and Energy Harvesting Applications

Peisheng He
Zihan Wang
2024

Animal skins often possess both functions of sensing and actuating to detect external stimulations and change shapes when needed, respectively. Furthermore, many animals, such as jellyfish and leptocephalus (eel larvae) have tissues that are transparent and ultra-stretchable, which are difficult to build in synthetic sensors and actuators. Moreover, all these living skins have self-healing properties, i.e. to restore their critical functions after being damaged. On the contrary, artificial electronic systems are often brittle and non-transparent. As such, biomimetic, skin-like materials...

BPN977: Metal-Loaded Metal Oxide Nanocomposites for Electronic Gas Sensors

Tzu-Chiao Wei
Yaprak Ozbakir
Veronica Arriaga
Sterling Cavanaugh
Carlo Carraro
2023

Semiconducting metal oxides (MOX) such as SnO2 are an industry-standard material for chemiresistive sensing. However, many MOX-based gas sensors suffer from poor sensitivity, limited selectivity—particularly in the presence of water vapor—and insufficient stability. To address these shortcomings, catalytically active noble metals, such as Pd, are loaded onto the MOX materials to form noble metal-loaded MOX nanocomposites. In this work, we focus on Pd-loaded SnO2 (Pd/SnO2) due to their promising sensitivity to and selectivity for CO and CH4. Pd/SnO2 nanocomposites with varying Pd/Sn...

BPN967: Quantum Emitters in Silicon Photonics

Lukasz Komza
Yu-Lung Tang
Hanbin Song
Zihuai Zhang
2023

The G center, an atom-like single-photon emitter in silicon, has emerged as a promising candidate for realizing a quantum-coherent light source in integrated photonics. Our recent work demonstrating two-photon quantum interference with a single waveguide-integrated G center highlights the utility of G centers for photonic quantum information applications. However, improvements in the optical coherence properties of the G center must be achieved to enable its technological implementation. We will address this challenge by leveraging the integration capabilities of the silicon platform...

BPN931: Multiplexed Electroluminescent Device for Emission from Infrared to Ultraviolet Wavelength

Vivian Wang
2023

Using electroluminescence as a metrology method could have many advantages for on-chip characterization of chemical composition, where the need for an on-chip light source can be eliminated and materials with different excitation energies can be characterized by the same device. However, the range of materials that can be used in electroluminescent devices is typically limited due to challenges related to material processing and band alignment. In this project, we aim to develop a multiplexed electroluminescent device that can produce electroluminescence from infrared to ultraviolet...

BPN982: Color-Tunable Alternating Current Light Emitting Diodes

Jongchan Kim
Vivian Wang
2022

Alternating current (AC) driven light emitting devices (LEDs) are recently dragging attention due to its efficient color tunability. These devices consist of multilayer structure as the direct current (DC) driven LEDs, but the multilayer structure has drawbacks such as the large amount of material usage that increases the fabrication cost, and the difficult yield control due to a number of processing steps. In contrast, a recently demonstrated AC driven LED with a single contact has several advantages compared to the previous structures such as simple device structure, diverse...

BPN981: Suppressing Energy Losses in Compact Superconducting Qubits

Kadircan Godeneli
Mutasem Odeh
Eric Li
2022

State-of-the-art quantum computers currently have qubit gate error rates that are too large for practical computing. Quantum error correction can protect computations from physical errors by encoding logical qubits in many physical qubits. However, physical qubit error rates need to be sufficiently low to minimize resource overhead and suppress errors. As a result, compact qubit designs with small dissipation and error rates are crucial to scaling up a fault-tolerant quantum computer. In this project, we aim to address the scaling up of superconducting quantum processors by...