The Project

Josh and I have finally started working on Dr. Li's project in earnest now. I'm going to describe the process we'll be going through sometime in the next year.

1. Deposit a um of silver on an SiO2 (glass) substrate.
2. Use an EM field to cause the SiO2 to essentially absorb the silver through ion exchange and "dope" the surface of the glass with silver. This will create a waveguide for light so that a laser shown at the surface will travel along the surface of the substrate.
3. Lithography: Use a photoresist, a mask, and some method of etching to cut away the doped glass to create individual narrow channels. The current mask design will have 24 waveguides, but that may change before it's actually made.
4. Electron-Beam Lithography : Use an electronresist and an E-beam lithographer to Etch different structures into each waveguide. The photo lithography will have features as small as 3 um, With E-Beam lithography we can get down below 100 nm if necessary.
5. Shine different frequency lasers through each waveguide and find out if certain wavelengths have 100% transmission.

The downside to this picking up is that I haven't been able to spend as much time at the mission in the last few days. The upside is that I am more excited about what we're doing than I have been all summer.

Yesterday we toured the Air Force Research Lab where several UD graduates work. It was exciting to see their rather extensive facilities and I was able to understand at least 90% of what the person giving us the tour said to us. I realized that I have learned quite a bit this summer and can picture myself going to grad school for nanofabrication, whether Optics or EE I'm still not sure. I have a few good schools to investigate though. U of Urbana-Champagne in Illinois, North Carolina State University, University of Central Florida, and a Michigan State University all have large clean room facilities and good programs (or so I've been told).

In other news, the rear derailler on my bike needs to be replaced and I'd much rather buy a road bike, so if you know someone who has a decent road bike that they want to get ride of for cheap, let me know :D.