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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