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Program Highlights for year 2012

Optical Topological Transition in Metamaterials

Manipulating the topology of iso-frequency surface provides a new approach for control of light-matter interaction. This is demonstrated using anisotropic metamaterials consisting of metal-dielectric layers. 

A high-performance, metal-free metamaterial in the near-IR

Metals have many disadvantages as components of optical metamaterials. Semiconductor-based materials overcome these problems. We build a high performance, all-semiconductor-based metamaterial by replacing metal with heavily-doped zinc oxide and demonstrate negative refraction in this near-infrared metamaterial. This demonstration

Moving and Rotating Particles with Low Light Levels

LCMRC researchers have developed a method for manipulating particles by light without touching them by using liquid crystals as a light-controlled host fluid.

Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal-Based Pico-Projectors

Center researchers are collaborating with spin-off Displaytech (now part of Micron Technologies) to develop ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) materials for application in picoprojectors.  The high-quality time sequential color and high brightness enabled by FLC switching speed, and high fill fact

Silicon/Organic Heterojunctions for Photovoltaics

In a photovoltaic cell, an incident photon creates an electron (black circle in top sketch) and a hole (open circle).

IRG-C: Self-assembly of ionic surfactants accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs)

                                                                                                   

Ionic micellar assemblies have been simulated over μs time scales on GPUs (image on cover of Soft Matter).

MRFN Shared Facilities Workshop

The Materials Research Facilities Network hosted a Shared Facilities Workshop, held at Northwestern University, Nov 1-2, 2011. 

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