Roman Sobolewski - US grants

9413989 FAUCHET We propose to assemble, through instrumentation acquisition and development, a versatile femtosecond laser system dedicated to research on advanced materials, high-performance electronic and optoelectronic devices and circuits, and ultra-high bit rate optical communication systems. The facility is based on a titanium sapphire (Ti:S) laser oscillator and amplifier system, which generates pulses of less than 100 femtosecond duration tunable form 750 nm to 1000 nm, either at a repetition rate of 100 MHz and level of 10 nJ per pulse, or at a repetition rate of 1 kHz and level of 1 mJ per trains tunable to near 5 um at a level of 1 nJ per pulse, and optical parametric amplifier capable of generating 1 kHz-100 fsec pulse trains tunable in the same range but at a level of better than 10 uJ per pulse, a femtosecond white light continuum generation station and a terahertz generator, capable of producing electromagnetic radiation form near dc to more than 10 THz. This one-of-a-kind laser facility is at the cutting edge of the most modern femtosecond laser technology. As such, part of it will be acquired form a company that specializes in this kind of equipment, and another part will be designed, built and tested by us. This facility will be operated by five primary users with backgrounds in applied physics, electrical engineering, plasma physics and optics, who are the co-principal investigators, already have established successful joint research efforts, and have ample experience with and are committed to ultra fast technology, process and devices. The scope of the research to be conducted using the new facility runs from device and circuit testing to basic nonlinear physical phenomena in condensed matter, and form semiconductors to superconductors and polymers. The common them is the need for high peak power femtosecond laser pulses tunable form the visible to the mid-infrared, which this for facility will provide. Examples of projects include nonlinear materials and devices f or the 3 to 5 um region and enhancement of optical nonlinearities via quantum interference, testing of microelectronics circuits using an electro-optic imager, design and testing of ultra-wide-band optical repeaters for fiber communications, ultra fast processes and development of photodetectors in high-temperature superconductors, and high order harmonic generation. Funding of this facility by the National Science Foundation will boost the activities of the active ultra fast community at the University of Rochester. The leadership of the Rochester group in the area of application of ultra fast lasers to the study of materials and the development and testing of devices relevant to advanced materials and high-performance communication will be renewed and reemphasized through access to the most state-of-the-art equipment. As a result, other researchers, forma the University of Rochester and local companies such as Kodak, Xerox and Clark-MXR with which we have had long-lasting collaborations, will be encouraged to use the facility. In addition, the quality and diversity of the graduate students and post-doctoral students attracted to our facility will be maintained and improved.

ABSTRACT CTS-9871042 Susan N. Houde-Walter, Dennis G. Hall, Roman Sobolewski University of Rochester Title: Acquisition of SEM/EDX for Materials and Device Research The College Microscopy Lab at the University of Rochester will purchase a Philips Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope with EDX analysis system. The laboratory serves eight academic departments, a program in Biomedical Engineering, the Center for Optics Manufacturing, and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Projects include circular grating lasers, nanoparticle-enhanced photodetection, glass micro-optics, genetics of plant reproductive development, laser fusion targets, magneto rheological finishing, and ceramics composites CVD. Cost-sharing of over 38% is provided by the university.

This individual investigator award is to several professors at the University of Rochester for a project aimed at an improved understanding of the vortex dynamics and pinning effects in high-temperature superconductors (HTS). This project will make use of modern femtosecond laser techniques and both electro-optic (EO) and magneto-optic (MO) imaging methods to provide time-resolved two-dimensional images of intrinsic vortex dynamics in HTS thin films, single crystals, and wires. Specific problems to be addressed include vortex nucleation and motion in the presence of random and periodic pinning, dynamical phase transitions of vortex matter induced by transport current, and vortex velocity distributions in flux-flow channels above the critical current. This research should have important implications for high-power applications of HTS materials. This is a highly interdisciplinary research project, which will involve graduate and undergraduate students and faculty members in physics, materials science, and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, as well as researchers at
Argonne National Laboratory. The students will gain skills to enable them to compete in the future market place.
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Superconductors are of great importance because they can carry very large electrical currents with zero resistance. These currents in turn produce very large magnetic fields. However, for currents above a certain "critical current", the material will no longer be a superconductor since magnetic vortices suddenly penetrate the superconductor, producing resistive loss and sometimes catastrophic heating in the material. In order to make superconductors that can carry ever higher currents, it is essential to understand this breakdown mechanism in more detail. This individual investigator award is to several professors at the University of Rochester for a project that will make use of femtosecond lasers arranged as ultrafast two-dimensional imaging cameras to take a series of snapshots of a superconductor while this breakdown is taking place, resulting in a "slow-motion movie" of the rapid dynamics of the magnetic vortices as they enter the superconductor. The results of this study should provide clues to making higher-quality High-temperature superconducting wires, tapes, and thin films for a variety of electronic and energy-related applications. This is a highly interdisciplinary research project, which will involve graduate and undergraduate students and faculty members in physics, materials science, and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, as well as researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. The students will gain skills to enable them to compete in the future market place.
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This award allows Roman Sobolewski to collaborate with Michael Siegel of the National Research Center (Forschungszentrum) in Juelich, Germany. The project will investigate the intrinsic dynamical properties of high-temperature superconducting Josephson junctions by experimental determination of the coupling mechanism for the junction when switched either by picosecond electrical pulses or perturbed by femtosecond-pulse optical excitations.

The ultimate goal of the research is to develop and fabricate high-temperature superconducting devices and circuits for ultrafast computing and optoelectronic links for supercomputing electronics. The research will also test the ultimate limit of the operating speed of a single-flux quantum superconducting Josephson gate.

0420888
Stroud

The objective of this research is to develop instrumentation supporting and enhancing research efforts in three University of Rochester departments in the field of quantum optics, quantum information, nanotechnology, and microscopy. The instrumentation will allow the production, detection, and characterization of individual photons interacting with matter. It will consist of three modules: a single-photon-on-demand source, high-speed single-photon detectors with 10% efficiency at optical communications wavelengths, and a high-speed photon statistics analyzer that can operate with 8 ps time resolution. These state-of-the-art facilities will support research in the Institute of Optics, the departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Center for Quantum Information. The PIs will collaborate in this project with BBN Technologies, which is building the world's first absolutely secure quantum key distribution network.

The intellectual merit of this proposal is that it provides essential instrumentation supporting research in some of the most promising new fields of technology: quantum information processing, quantum communications, and nanoscience. All of these involve the controlled interaction of the smallest units of light with the smallest units of matter: single photons interacting with single molecules. The facilities developed in this project will allow work at the University of Rochester to progress in all of these fields. The broader impact toward which this research is aimed is the development of quantum computers exponentially more powerful than any classical computer, the development of communication systems secure from any known method of eavesdropping, and miniaturization of medical and diagnostic instrumentation to the nanometer scale.

Dr. Marc Feldman
ECS 0609140

This NIRT proposal focuses on nonlinear ballistic transport at room temperature. Ballistic transport is usually considered an aspect of the quantum physics regime, and has been studied intensively at cryogenic temperatures. Nevertheless certain ballistic deflection effects in mesostructures are quite robust at room temperature. An example is the "ballistic rectifier." The ballistic deflection nonlinearity can be used to construct other devices and circuitry operating at room temperature that are very different from conventional circuitry. In this research ballistic deflection devices and circuitry will be fabricated, tested, and analyzed. Simultaneously the physics of nonlinear room temperature ballistic transport will be investigated; and the architectural challenges presented by the unfamiliar requirements and opportunities of circuitry based upon mesoscopic ballistic transport will be explored. This project is ideal for a multidisciplinary approach, in that investigations at the physics, the device, the circuit, and the architectural level are joined to build a "ballistic electronics."

Intellectual Merit: of the proposed research is that nonlinear ballistic transport at room temperature, including experimental devices such as the ballistic rectifier, remains poorly understood.

Broader Impacts: of specific initiatives on education, on diversity, and on research dissemination, integrated into the research program. The technical focus of this proposal is a realistic area for future practical applications -- room temperature, sub-100 nm device geometry, moderate voltages inducing non-linear transport, and high frequencies. If the predictions of our preliminary model regarding these four issues are borne out, then room temperature BDT circuitry operating at a terahertz and beyond, with very low power requirement, will be suitable for a multitude of applications.

Proposal Number: ECCS-0824075
Proposal Title: Semiconductor spintronics devices and circuits
PI Name: Dery, Hanan
PI Institution: University of Rochester


Semiconductor spintronics devices and circuits

H. Dery, M. Huang, & R. Sobolewski


The objective of this research is to study properties of the electron?s quantum mechanical spin that can be used in the design of logic circuitry in the future. This study will explore innovative high-performance computer architectures that capitalize on the electrical and magnetic control of lateral spin-based devices. The approach is to design, fabricate, characterize, and model hybrid semiconductor/ferromagnet lateral devices that are based on spin-accumulation. The use of advanced, ultrafast magneto-optical spectroscopy techniques will be used to characterize the spin transport and to probe the physics in these devices.

Intellectual Merit
Virtually all of today's digital electronics use voltage levels to process data. This choice of information coding has provided tremendous scaling and growth in the semiconductor industry. Voltage, however, is not the only representation available. Commercial storage devices encode information using the electron's quantum mechanical spin. The proposed research studies the tradeoffs between advanced digital devices that rely on the charge of electrons and devices that rely on the quantum mechanical spin of electrons.


Broader impacts
The proposed program holds the potential to improve the architecture of high-performance computers. It may affect a variety of everyday applications by allowing lower power consumption and additional programmability of electronic circuits. The educational activities in this program involve (I) training of both undergraduate and graduate students, (II) encourage students from under-represented groups to join our team by using the on-going McNair program, and (III) the establishment of a new course about spin-based electronics.

The objective of this research is to develop a new clocking system for future-generation high-speed systems-on-chip such as high-performance multi-core microprocessors, in order to overcome the fundamental challenges in timing, noise and power consumption facing conventional clocking. In the proposed clocking scheme, a global clock is distributed across the chip, and then regenerated locally by injection-locked oscillators. The approach is based on a nonlinear circuit technique, injection locking, and a full suite of supporting technologies in systems, devices, and physics.

Intellectual Merit: This project will advance the understanding of timing uncertainties in integrated systems, investigate potential challenges in injection-locked clocking, and develop multi-level (device, circuit, and system) techniques to address both. The proposed clocking scheme can deliver significant power savings and noise reduction compared to conventional clocking, and seamlessly replace the latter without disruption to the design flow and manufacturing infrastructures.

Broader Impacts: The research results have the potential to critically impact computing, communications, radars, and other high-speed electronics applications. This project will enable a series of integrated educational activities through curriculum development, research results dissemination, and industry outreach. Special emphasis will be placed on under-represented minority student education and outreach to high school or younger students.

Quantum information processing (QIP) relies on the extraction, processing and manipulation, as well as transmission and detection of information by exploiting quantum properties of light and matter. QIP is expected to be used to secure and scale-up multiparty quantum computations to tackle computational problems that currently remain outside the reach of computers, such as large-scale molecular simulations for materials design and drug discovery; or it can connect a network of distributed quantum sensors for ultraprecise measurements with applications to biological imaging, gravitometry, and position navigation-timing. In a general landscape of QIP, quantum communications plays a special role, because it can be used to implement a secure data transmission network, leveraging the concept of quantum cryptography, where the security of transmission is guaranteed by the basic laws of quantum physics. Over the last decade, there has been tremendous progress in science and technology related to the generation, manipulation, storage, propagation, and detection of photons for QIP. Much of this progress has been focused on developing individual device components that satisfy the rather stringent requirements of QIP at the single-photon level. Integrating these individual components into a complete quantum-communication system with optimized operation requires an interdisciplinary approach. The move beyond individual discrete components necessitates a new paradigm that will integrate various components on a single chip. The main vision of this research is to push the frontiers of engineering in quantum technologies by implementing a silicon-based integrated platform and exploring the interactions of quantum devices in a quantum network. In addition to the advancement of the new science and technology, a major outcome will be the exposure of undergraduate and graduate students working on this project to a broad range of topics in an interdisciplinary environment. This broad teaching/research experience is a platform to train the highly skilled workforce of the future.


This transformative project will integrate novel devices for the generation, manipulation, propagation, and detection of single and entangled photons for quantum information processing in a silicon photonics platform that can be used to implement a large-scale quantum communication network. This is a highly interdisciplinary project that brings together expertise in materials science and engineering; semiconductor fabrication, processing, and devices; superconducting device physics; classical nonlinear and quantum optics; and optical communications to solve technical challenges for the development and realization of a scalable integrated quantum communication platform. The research covers both design and fabrication of single-photon and entangled photon pair sources, single-photon detectors, and integrated channels to manipulate photons, as well as experiments to characterize the quantum nature of the photonic states for implementation in viable quantum communication protocols. The proposed integrated platform is very promising for implementation in a quantum communication system network, as well as in development and realization of large-scale systems. The individual components and devices that will be used in the proposed research are quite novel and amenable to scalable integration using standard semiconductor device processing technologies. Superconducting quantum-dot light-emitting diodes, whose operation is based on Cooper-pair interband transition in a semiconductor, will be developed to generate single- and pair-photon states. For single-photon detection, traveling-wave superconducting nanostripe single-photon detectors will be developed and integrated in the device platform. The on-demand electrically driven photon sources, as well as single-photon detectors, will be used along with passive silicon nitride waveguides, all integrated on the silicon substrate, to study various scenarios for quantum information processing implementations, such as characterization of path-entangled photons, multi-qubit entanglement, quantum state tomography, and, potentially, as a proof-of-concept for quantum communication protocols.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes (QLCI) program is part of the Quantum Leap, one of the research Big Ideas promoted by the National Science Foundation. This award is a QLCI Conceptualization Grant, which supports activities to build capacity among teams planning for the large-scale, interdisciplinary Challenge Institute projects that aim to advance the frontiers of quantum information science and engineering. Research at these Institutes will span the focus areas of quantum computation, quantum communication, quantum simulation, and/or quantum sensing. The Institutes are expected to foster multidisciplinary approaches to specific scientific, technological, and workforce development goals in these fields.

This Conceptualization Grant will develop well-formulated plans for a future Challenge Institute proposal along the theme of quantum photonics, topological computations, and molecular spintronics.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.