With the rapid growth of worldwide internet traffic in data centers and clouds, silicon photonics has been utilized to provide enormous data bandwidth and outstanding energy efficiency over electronics. Computing servers and storage servers that are connected by communication links are relying more on optical rather than electrical means mainly...
Particleboard is a widely used composite panel product
consisting of consolidated wood particles and adhesive. On
a macro level the panel appears to be homogeneous, however,
its density varies both throughout the plane of the panel
as well as through its thickness. Of concern for this
thesis is the through-thickness...
The purpose of this research is to provide a simple fabrication method for zinc oxide and antimony sulfide based thin film solar cells. Both a ZnO nanorod electron conducting structure and a stibnite absorber show promise in a solar cell. Initial attempts at using only ZnO and Sb2S3, however, resulted...
Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), such as indium-tin oxide (ITO), have attracted increasing interests in integrated photonics and nanophotonics, owing to their large plasma dispersion and epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) effect. The refractive index modulation induced by free carriers in TCOs leads to a large electro-optic effect that can enable ultra-compact device footprint...
This dissertation focuses on extending the application scope of surface enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy to gas sensing. The method we propose is incorporating plasmonic nanostructures with nano-composite material, metalorganic framework, which can selectively preconcentrate certain gas molecules into the nanopores. The preconcentrating property is first demonstrated by applying metal-organic framework...
Silicon photonics has become the most promising platform for future large-scale optical interconnect and optical computing systems due to its inherent CMOS compatibility, which brings exclusive advantages in bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Parallel optical interconnects based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the capacity to meet the...
This dissertation focuses on the development of ultra-compact optical devices for free-space modulation. We propose a surface-normal modulator using metallic photonic crystals for free-space optical interconnects. The active control of light intensity is achieved by engineering the Fano resonances in metallic photonic crystals. Both thermo-optic modulation and electro-optic modulation of...
This dissertation focuses on the application of diatom frustules, the biosilica shell of an algae possessing physical and photonic properties capable of enhancing optical signals, for the enhancement of optical sensing. In this work, we incorporate diatom frustules into biosensors for signal enhancement and improved target molecule detection. The potential...
We consider the problem of computing the cannonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) for large-scale dense tensors. This work is a combination of alternating least squares and fiber sampling. Data sparsity can be leveraged to handle large tensor CPD, but this route is not feasible for dense data. Inspired by stochastic optimization's...
Tensor mathematics provides a powerful language to visualize and analyze physical phenomena. In the last three decades, tensors have been used in various application areas. The visualization and analysis of tensors fields have seen much advance, both in 2D and 3D. However, the physical interpretations of the topological analysis are...
