Brief Description of Project:
This project will be
tailored to best meet the interests of the student and Professor Weiss’
research group. The large surface area of porous silicon enables a
variety of applications for the use of porous silicon as a host matrix.
Two opportunities exist for this project.
(1) The development of
composite porous silicon/light emitting nanocrystal LEDs. This
initiative will investigate how the advantages of solid state lighting
can be incorporated into a silicon-compatible platform. Silicon-based
devices have the advantage of easy integration with standard
microelectronic devices, which extend the utility of the light sources
to applications such as optical interconnects. Traditionally, silicon is
not an efficient light-emitter due to its indirect band gap.
Incorporating efficient, light emitting nanocrystals into a porous
silicon matrix allows efficient light emission from a silicon-based
device. In this project, the ability of a porous silicon resonant cavity
to modify and enhance the emission spectrum of cadmium selenide and lead
sulfide nanocrystals will be investigated.
(2) The development of
porous silicon biosensors and drug delivery devices. This research is
motivated by the need to detect small amounts of material for medical
diagnostics, food safety, and homeland security, as well as control the
concentration and release rate of drugs in the body. The ability to
accurately control the pore size and shape enables the effective capture
of desired biomolecules (e.g., DNA, toxins, and viruses) for biosensing
applications and regulates the diffusion rate of loaded chemicals for
drug delivery applications. In this project, the sensitivity limits of
porous silicon sensors and the drug diffusion rates in porous silicon
thin films will be investigated.
The
student will also have the opportunity to help create an interferometric
lithography set-up in which periodic one- and two-dimensional structures
(e.g., gratings, arrays of holes) can be formed based on the
interference of laser beams. |
A Brief Research Plan (period is for 10 weeks):
An
undergraduate student working on this nanotechnology-driven project will
be involved in the fabrication of porous silicon thin film devices.
Characterization and testing of the devices will be accomplished by
fiber-coupled white light reflectance measurements, photoluminescence
measurements using an Argon-Krypton laser, angular reflectance
measurements using a prism coupler, and fluorescence measurements using
a spectrofluorimeter. The student involved in this project will gain
first hand experience in the laboratory in the areas of optical
measurements, electrochemical synthesis, data processing and analysis,
and potentially biochemistry.
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