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Highlights

Jul 6, 2012

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

Gururaj V. Naik, Jingjing Liu, Alexander V. Kildishev, Vladimir M. Shalaev and Alexandra Boltasseva School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907.

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 could lead to real-world metamaterial devices and unravel many new physical phenomena.  
Jun 25, 2012
University of Colorado at Boulder

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. The LC host reduces the illumination required by factors up to 10,000X relative to direct manipulation with optical tweezers, to the extent that lasers are no longer needed for many applications. LCMRC designed and synthesized photosensitive azobenzene monolayers control the LC orientation, which in turn moves the particles.
Jun 25, 2012
University of Colorado at Boulder

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 factor and ultra-small pixels achievable with FLCs makes FLC-on-silicon the choice display technology for picoprojectors.
Jun 7, 2012
Princeton University

Silicon/Organic Heterojunctions for Photovoltaics

J.C. Sturm, A. Kahn, Y.-L. Loo and J. Schwartz

In a photovoltaic cell, an incident photon creates an electron (black circle in top sketch) and a hole (open circle). For maximum efficiency, the opposite charges should be swept to opposite electrodes of the device (arrows) before they have a chance to recombine. The efficiency is further enhanced if a wide band gap organic semiconductor (e.g. P3HT) is grown on the surface of silicon.
Jun 7, 2012
Princeton University

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

D. N. LeBard, B. G. Levine, A. Jusufi, M. L. Klein (Temple), P. Mertmann, S. A. Barr, S. Sanders, and A. Z. Panagiotopoulos (Princeton)

                                                                                                    Ionic micellar assemblies have been simulated over μs time scales on GPUs (image on cover of Soft Matter).
Jun 4, 2012
University of California, Santa Barbara

MRFN Shared Facilities Workshop

The Materials Research Facilities Network hosted a Shared Facilities Workshop, held at Northwestern University, Nov 1-2, 2011.  The event brought together technical staff from 24 MRSEC and PREM institutions for 1.5 days to discuss day-to-day operations of Shared Experimental Facilities.