Nishi Nano-Electronics Group• Demonstrate a CMOS compatible laser near 1550 nm with germanium (Ge), enabling a key component of future high speed telecommunication network and optical interconnect systems.• Initiated collaboration with scientists from Applied Materials to conduct laser annealing experiments to improve the photoluminescence of germanium.• Oral presentation at the 2nd International Symposium on Photonics and Electronics Convergence 2012 on improvement in photoluminescence efficiency of germanium.• Published – Lennon et al., Increased Photoluminescence from Single-Mode Microwave Annealing of N-type Ge-on-Si”, Appl. Phys. Lett. 108, 112105 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4944578• Designed photonic crystal with large bandgap using frequency domain simulations with MPB.• Increased the photoluminescence of Ge by 68x with our photonic crystal structure.• Computed different device structures with Sentaurus TCAD to reduce Auger recombination.• Developed an optimization method to minimize the cost of a thulium doped microdisk laser.

• Designed an experiment with multiple lasers and a vision system, for photoluminescence and reflection characterization of photonic and plasmonic devices at low temperatures with cryostat.• Simulated, developed, and evaluated subsequent generation of nano-photonic devices with a team.

Optical Nanostructures Laboratory• Increased the reflectivity of a silicon nitride (SiNx) membrane, which would improve laser cooling of the membrane to even lower temperatures, so as to observe an individual quantum jump from the membrane’s ground state to its first excited state.• Published – Bui et al., High-reflectivity, high-Q nanomembrane resonators via guided photonic crystal resonances for enhanced optomechanical coupling, Appl. Phys. Lett. 100, 021110 (2012); also at: arxiv.org/abs/1110.3625.

• Designed with a team a circuit board for a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) optical transceiver using in-house components with DXP 2004.